Boxed: A Story of Talent
by D. M. Domini
Summary: When Hemlata Maharanjani was three, her mother sold her. By the time Talents noticed her, the damage had been done, and she was shipped to Blundell for personality reconfiguration, a steel skullcap, and possibly even forced burnout. She was twelve.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** The world and characters in this story come from _The Talent and the Hive_ and _The Pegasus_ series of novels. Everything belongs to Anne McCaffrey. I'm just playacting with my invisible Talent Action Figures in my mind. I'd like to think I'm a T-4 or so storywriter, working my way up to T-2 by proximity to a Prime's works, but who knows. :D

**Author's Note:** This is a story done in the manner of _The Rowan_ and _Damia_, except that it takes place in the timeline a few years after _The Tower and the Hive_. I wanted to write it earlier into the timeline, but the earlier in the timeline the fewer Primes there were, and it was just impossible to fit in unless I fit it into the space between _To Ride Pegasus_ and _The Rowan_, which wasn't ideal either. My Rowan/Damia canon is pretty sharp, but not so much for the books after it. Some terms and things will be "retro", from _The Rowan_, or from the Pegasus books, since I prefer that version of the world. Sorry if there's any mistakes regarding canon.

* * *

**Boxed - A Story of Talent**

_When the Rowan was three, she was orphaned in a mudslide, and spent her childhood under electronic and telepathic surveillance lest the terrifying experience plant the seeds of a deviant personality in her powerful Prime-level mind._

_When Hemlata Maharanjani was three, her mother sold her illegally to a trio of miners settling on Capella's arid spans. By the time Talents noticed her, the damage had been done, and she was shipped to Blundell for personality reconfiguration, a steel skullcap, and possibly even forced burnout. She was twelve._

"This is...beyond...beyond..." T-4 Talent Gollee Gren stared at the plastic printouts scattered on the nuwood desk in front of him, speechless. Even Jeff Raven, Earth Prime, couldn't catch anything more then a brown jumble of chaotic feelings and half-thoughts from his second in command. Gollee was undoubtedly in denial. Jeff wished he could be.

Jeff thinned his lips into a grim line. "I did the mind scan myself, Gollee; Capella wouldn't catch any containers until I did. She has a tendency towards hysterics in situations like these, but for once old Ironpants is right." He sighed heavily, rubbing his face with both of his hands, before gulping down some coffee that scorched his throat. He grimaced and set the plastic cup on the table with a loud tap. "Sometimes I think the only good things to come off of Capella are Afra and wine."

"She's a telepath and a telekinetic. Is she an empath too?" Gollee asked, poking through the printouts with a reluctant finger.

"No. If she was, it's gone now; no empath could live as she did and survive. She has a hate-on for the world, and to be honest, I don't blame her. And she's brainwashed to hide it--you think Afra's polite blankness when he's hiding something is disconcerting, try a twelve year old girl with a flaming cyclone behind her shields. She hides her feelings, she hides her thoughts, seems the best-mannered young Capallan girl you'd ever meet. Until she snaps."

"Until she snaps," Gollee echoed, looking at the photo of a crumpled man with blood pooling out of his ears. "What did this guy do to her?"

"Triggered a bad memory. She didn't mean it, but it doesn't make him any less dead."

"Good lord."

"I don't see how there's any way we can avoid shutting her talent down. She's still a child, but I don't think all the psychotherepy and outright mental manipulation in the world is going to patch her up good enough to be a normal person, much less a functional prime talent. The best we can do is keep her record sealed with clauses, so at least she's not considered a criminal, lock away or burn out her talent, and get a really good child psychiatrist. Maybe now she's out of that situation she'll grow up somewhat happy. But we can't risk her having her talent free."

"Damn it, Jeff, why didn't someone find out about this? Doesn't Capella have any clairvoyants or precogs?" Gollee started to rise out of denial and into anger.

"Plenty, but none with focuses on children in the arid spans. Only one with that area specialty, and he only catches cave-ins, industrial accidents, inclement weather, that sort of thing."

"Never where we need them. We need a pre-cog that can predict what sorts of pre-cogs we need, and where."

For the first time that day, Jeff cracked a smile. "When you find one, will you let me know? I'll give them a nice signing bonus."

"Ha." Gren tried to smile back, but it faded quickly. "Where is she now?"

"She sedated, in the medical complex, and I have my mind on her, in case she wakes up anyway. Before I gave the orders to do anything, I wanted your thoughts. I'd never forgive myself if there was something else we could do for her, and we didn't."

"Before we burn her out. Well, my thoughts..." Gollee opened his mind, and sent the other man a collage of thoughts and feelings. Black horror, regret in shades of brown, flashes of lemon yellow pity, and a sort of medical curiosity that the first three emotions mostly buried, and Gollee felt guilty about. "If I have any useful thoughts," Gollee added verbally. "I'll let you know. But I don't have anything you don't have, right now."

Jeff nodded, having known there wasn't much more they could do, but wanting to double-check anyway. "Well then." He scooped up the files he had thrown down in front of Gren and slipped them into their folder. The empty coffee cup he tossed into the trashcan with a flick of his mind. "I'll contact the medics and schedule the time for the procedure." He rose to his feet and left Gollee Gren's office, the tired, distressed man vanishing as the strong Earth Prime public persona came to the fore. The door swished closed behind him with a slight squeak.

Gren absently made a mental note about the squeak, and turned back to the roster of new up-and-coming Talent on his screen. But his mind wasn't on it, and the work went slow. "Some people should just be neutered," he said, referring to both the minors who had mistreated the child, and the mother who had birthed her and then sold her away.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**

"I want her." Afra Lyon's declaration was calm as he gazed into the girl's hospital room through the video screen. She lay asleep, heavily sedated after three prime medics had completed the deep subliminal blocks on her talent, and inserted the personal psychic dampers under the skin at her temples. "Damia agrees."

Jeff and Gollee looked at each other behind the man's back. "Hell, Afra, I'd take her home myself if I thought it were wise," Gollee said. "But she just had her talent blocked off. I don't think living with a high-talent family such as yours or mine is going to make her comfortable. It'll probably make her antagonism worse, knowing what she's lost, on top of all the other losses of her past. And she might have a problem with the color of your skin--it's not uncommon for victims such as her to blame an entire planet, if they manage to get offworld."

Afra turned away from the screen, and leaned against the wall to look at them, his arms crossed over his chest. "I could see that. I could also see the blocks failing if she really is prime-level talent, and those dampers being pulled out of her head, if she's not adverse to a little pain and blood. Where would we be if that happened without high level talents around? If she comes to live on Iota Aurigae, Damia and I won't let that happen, and maybe we can show her not all Talents or green-skinned folk are bad." He was quiet for a moment, his yellow eyes thoughtful. "Not that I'd prefer it, but why wasn't she burned out?"

Jeff spoke this time. "I don't think we could do it without killing her. She'd have to be awake for it, and the trauma would be fatally overwhelming, Elizara said. A lesser Talent just takes a short burn by a powerful mind. One with her potential--?" He let the thought trail off. Nobody mentioned that once Afra himself had nearly been burnt out, and even after all of that he had bounced back as a T-2. High Talents didn't burn out quickly or easily. "I won't be a party to killing children, no matter what they've done, if I've any better choice at all."

"You'd make a shoddy evil overlord, Jeff," Gollee joked lightly.

"How do you know I'm not one already?"

"Neither I nor Afra have ever been thrown into random cargo containers, or called 'Knave!' or 'Fool!' or anything at all like that."

Afra wisely did not mention the Rowan and her tirades, and instead cleared his throat.

"I know it's not a time to joke--" Gren started.

"Joke all you want. My request still stands, though. Once she's medically fit to leave, I want to take her to Iota Aurigae. Are there any medical or legal objections to this?"

"I think she'll be a handful if you're looking to combat empty nest syndrome, Afra," Jeff said. "Probe her mind once she's awake before deciding. You two haven't seen it yet..."

"I would have anyway," Afra said.

"The legal mumbo jumbo can be sorted through then, I'm sure," Jeff said. "As for physical health, she's healthy, now. Capella fed her up for about a month before she snapped. Were you aware that she's killed a man, Afra?"

"Damia didn't catch that, no." He paused and thought about it long enough that both men thought perhaps he'd back down. "It does makes a difference," he said finally, "But so long as it wasn't done out of malice--" and he caught the whisp of thought from Jeff, that it had been triggered by fear overloading an already damaged mind, "--we still want her."

Jeff grunted. "Talk to Elizara, then. She'll let you know when's a good time to approach the child."

"I will."


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**

Hemlata Maharanjani clawed her way out of the sappy web of sleep, the taste of rotten cherries in her throat. She gagged, an embarrassing retching sound which she covered with one brown hand, while the other clutched the plasticky bedsheets lest the room, which was spinning strangely, toss her to the floor like a ragdoll.

She retched again, a rude, grotesque sound, and turned on her side, hoping that would ease the spinning and the nausea.

Footsteps, flat and 2-D like a cartoon turned into audio, step, step, step, stepped closer, and a moment later a large man crouched in front of her next to the bed, a glass of water held in his green-skinned hand, but not offered. The clear water glinted against clear glass as minute vibrations went through it.

She didn't meet the man's eyes, and instead looked down, past his khaki-clad knees, down to the leather shoes which creased at the balls of his feet as he crouched before her. The shoes were lightweight, suitable for indoors, and he had socks with little russet paisleys on them.

Despite his proximity, she couldn't hear him, not a single stray thought. So she concluded, accurately, but for the wrong reason, that he must be another Talent like Prime Capella, or the blue-eyed imposing man who had opened her capsule and pierced her mind like a hot knife into warm butter.

"Hello, Hemlata," the man before her said in a calm tenor voice. "My name is Afra Lyon. How are you feeling?"

She didn't want to speak to anyone, but protocol clamored in her mind, louder now that he had introduced himself. She had to answer, it would be rude not to. She swallowed back the taste of rotten cherries, and said, "Hello Mister Lyon. I feel sick." She swallowed hard, and tried not to gag again as the air from speaking made the taste in her throat stronger.

"Do you think some water would help?" he asked, now offering the water with a gesture.

"I don't know." She raised herself up on one arm, the room spinning still, and took the glass from him, carefully sipping lest her stomach mistake her mouth opening up as an invitation to escape.

The water cut the taste on her tongue, like a stream cutting through dirt. She took a deeper swallow, then kept sipping until a fourth of the glass was gone. Sensing she was done, the man took the glass back from her. "Thank you," she said.

"Not at all," he replied. He stood up and set the glass on a table next to her bed, then went over to retrieve a chair that was up against the wall. She wondered why he didn't just grab it with his mind. "Have they told you why you're here?" he asked, after he had placed the chair next to the bed, and sat down on it.

"No." She remembered the sudden shattering of the silence, though, from before, and knew it had something to do with it. The fragile hardness of a shield like an eggshell, the way it crumpled, the way the man did a moment later. The minds around her rising up in horror, like a startled flock of birds launching into the air, with strange voids here and there where the telepathically insensitive didn't catch on. And Capella Prime's grasp, like a vise around her head, clamping down so that she could not think/move/talk/be/live without the Prime's permission. The ultimate authority, above her, infinitely vast, and powerful, and...hysterical, the high-pitched chattering of a mind beyond the pure mental power...as her knees failed and hit the plastic tile like bricks.

"You're in the medical complex at Blundell--Earth Tower--because your Talent has been burnt out."

She looked up from where she lay in the bed, and met his eyes. They were yellow, and held a great deal more sorrow then she'd ever seen displayed openly before, and it was strange, offensive almost that he would mock the method by providing a physical emotional display because she could no longer hear sympathy in his thoughts, or anyone's thoughts.

"The FT&T has no way of containing a Talent as strong as yours short of putting you in an iron cell for the rest of your life. While it's understood what you did was not pre-meditated or even intended, your Talent had to be contained for the well-being of yourself and others. You won't be locked away in a cell, and if you don't commit any violations of the law, you'll be able to grow up, obtain an education, get married, or do whatever you want to do."

"Will I go to jail first?"

"No. Given the circumstances, no further punishment is required then what has been done already." He paused. "You _will_ need to go through counseling."

"I see. Thank you for letting me know this, Mister Lyon." She thought for a moment. She should ask questions, it was expected of her. "When will I leave here? Where will I go?"

"They should discharge you in a day or so," he said. Then he gave her a warm smile, which she simultaneously liked and distrusted. "And you will be coming home with me to my wife on Iota Aurigae. We have eight children, but they're grown up now and gone, and we would be happy to welcome you into our home."

Oh. "Thank you," she said again, although she wasn't certain how she'd like that.

He nodded. "You're still feeling the effects of the sedative, so you should rest, and Aurigae goes operational in about two hours, so I'll need to leave, but I'll be back this evening. In the meantime, you might encounter Gollee Gren. He's a friend of mine, and handles a lot of things around here, including placement in classes. But that won't be for another five hours or so."

Sometime after Mister Lyon left, Hemlata felt the spinning and the nausea recede enough to sit up in bed. The glass of water was still there, temptingly three quarters full, so she drank, removing the last remnants of rotting cherries from her mouth, and brushed her short black hair out of her eyes. When she did so, her fingers encountered a bandage wrapped around her head. She touched her temple hesitantly, and felt a dull ache, so she left it alone.

She had an entertainment circuit in the room, she found, and flipped it on, curious. There had been one on Capella too, which she had enjoyed. This one was Terran though, with all sorts of entertainment from all over Earth, and quite different. She felt herself blush at some of the things she saw, and wondered if they had put her in the adult ward mistakenly somehow. She carefully turned it off and set the changer down, as if it, or somebody, might be offended she didn't like their entertainment.

With the entertainment ruled out, there wasn't much to do. She did try the door, but it was locked, as was the window. Looking out the window, she saw that she was fairly high up; the city stretched for miles around them, something alien for one who had grown up in the desert on Capella, with the nearest village klicks and klicks away.

She also saw the cradles and tarmac of the gigantic Earth Tower port, and the tiny dots of people moving around. Cargo occasionally floated around, and occasionally was driven around in forklifts. Some appeared out of nowhere, others vanished into thin air. People waved their little arms at one another, and in one case, a corner of the field was cordoned off, a pair of drug sniffing dogs present on the scene. The bone-level grumbles her subconscious mind had classified as mining-related where actually the constant peaking and crashing of the Tower dynamos, similar to those on Capella, but more active with all the traffic going in and out.

Her Talent had come and gone so quickly it was difficult to understand that this orchestra of man, machine, and materials below was something that had been in her reach, but was not anymore. She felt a sudden pang of mingled wonder and resentment and cynicism. She had dared, on Capella, to think that despite what the men told her, despite her upbringing, and grades, and all the unsavory things about her, that maybe she was special. They had said she was a high talent, and any fool knew that was your meal ticket to a good life. Nobody sane messed with any talent, much less a powerful one.

And the realization on Capella made her feel safe for the first time in her life. Like she could defend herself. Kick people who had kicked her first back. _Harder_.

But no more.

She tried to reach out to the little people on the tarmac, or even one of the dogs sitting next to its handler, but it felt like her brain had a severe muscular cramp, and her temples felt buzzy, as if they, and only they, were high on some sort of junk the indents sold to the men. She felt tears in her eyes, but willed them away, in case someone in one of the other skyscrapers had a telescope and could see her expression through the glass. She'd heard people on Earth were funny like that.

It was just as well; behind her, the door suddenly clicked and slid open, and a medic poked her head into the room. "Hemlata? How are you, are you hungry?"

Hemlata let go of her thoughts, letting them whisk away into nothing, lest the medic or someone else was trying to read them, and let herself be interested in the food (which, surprisingly, was not mushy or bland as you might expect hospital food to be).

As she ate, cross-legged on the bed, the medic sat next to her, and filled in information on the screen of the clipboard she carried. She was left-handed, which seemed sinister to Hemlata.

Hemlata watched the medic fill out her name (Hemlata Maharanjani, half of which she didn't really consider hers, yet), her age (twelve years, standard), her hair color (black), her eye color (brown), and her skin color (brown, with green tinting from Capella's sun. 'Brown-olive', the medic wrote next to it). She wondered if all people could be boiled down into a set of facts about them, like a history primer.

After the medic left, taking the empty food trays with her, she went to sleep, and slept until something unknown woke her. She stared at her arm, flung up against the pillow next to her, then heard a man clear his throat softly, from the direction of the door. "I beg your pardon, Miss Maharanjani," he said when she looked in his direction.

The man introduced himself as Gollee Gren, the person Mister Lyon had spoken of earlier, and he wore a smart brown suit, with tiny pins on his collar that said "FT&T" and "T-4" and "Earth Tower" on them, respectively. The FT&T one had a fierce-looking pegasus leaping over the initials. He also had a curly black wire going up around his ear. She wondered if he lacked telepathy, because of that.

"No, but some people who need to talk to me can't send," he said, obviously lifting that thought from her mind.

It seemed odd for someone who looked so much like a governmental agent to sit there and give her a battery of basic tests, but that's what he did, and she thought it would be impolite to ask him what he did in the FT&T.

"Alright, I think we're done here with this, Miss Maharanjani," Mister Gren said as he slipped the stylus into the clipboard and turned it off. "I'll be sending the results to Afra and Damia Raven-Lyon...Afra did tell you about--good, good," he said, before she could voice the confirmation. "Did he mention the Mrdinis?"

"Aliens?" she said.

"No?" Mister Gren looked startled. "That's odd of him, but I expect Afra will explain when he picks you up. You get some more rest, and when you see Afra, let him know Gollee says hello." And he smiled at her.

She wondered why he wanted her to say hello, considering telepaths could say hello any time. Maybe a T-4 wasn't strong enough to do that, or something. She looked at him for a second, pausing to see if he'd reply to that thought, but he didn't, so she told him that she would say hello on his behalf.

"Great. You have a good evening then, I'm sure we'll see each other again, sooner or later, I hop over to Aurigae every so often, or they come here. Afra and Damia have a lovely family, I've known Afra since I was not much older then you, and Damia since she was born. I'm sure you'll do well with them." With those sudden reassurances, he left her to herself again.

She wondered why the man had felt as if he had to reassure her about her foster family, but couldn't find any hidden meanings to tease out of his words, and eventually she went to sleep again.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**

"Oh, did you hit your head, sweetie?" the saleswoman said, as Hemlata and Afra unloaded a small shopping trolley at the checkout counter. He had told her that after his last two children started outgrowing clothes, everything had been donated to charity, since they hadn't had any more "coming up the line". So he had taken her shopping. Capella had shipped her off of the planet so fast nobody had remembered to send her clothing with her.

She felt an underlying resentment at that, and gazed at the empathically frowning saleswoman with jaded eyes, although she kept her face serene. "No, I didn't hit my head. My Talent was burned out because I'm a future menace to society." She smiled sweetly.

If it had been anyone else other then Afra there with her today, Hemlata would have gotten a good furious, or shocked, or distressed expression out of them. Afra just paused, looking at her unblinkingly with those yellow eyes of his, while the saleswoman put a little finger in her ear and itched, which seemed quite unhygienic.

"Come again? I'm sorry, my ears were ringing for a moment--happens when you start to get to my age." And she shook her head as if to clear it.

"She had some surgery, but she's recovering," Afra said in a polite but final manner which made it clear he wasn't going to say any more about it to a stranger.

The saleswoman got the picture, and moved onto another subject. "We're having a sale on shoes today," and she pointed to a sign. "My granddaughter is crazy about the brand, says all the girls have them..."

Hemlata saw Afra's glance at her, but said nothing, while making it very clear in her mind that should would like to try on a pair. But like their journey through the racks of shirts, pants, skirts, and underwear, he only responded to what she said out loud. She wondered if that meant he wasn't reading her mind, or if he was, but was pretending not to. Maybe he wasn't telepathic. She hadn't asked him what his Talents were, and unlike Gollee Gren, hadn't made it clear that he could hear her thoughts by responding to something before she could say it. Or maybe now he was mad at her now. She'd only said the truth to the lady, but the truth was always problematic. Funny how some truths were good, and some were bad, depending on who you said them around. _But_...he was Capallian, though, born and bred, as proved by his green skin. Which meant he was Methody. Which meant he wouldn't want her to lie. Right?

_You must NEVER lie to me, _one of the men had told her, time and time again. And time and time again, she had lied to him, even knowing what her punishment would be. The adrenaline and fear from the lie numbed the pain anyway. She let the thought whisk into nothing again; she wasn't in the arid spans, she was on Earth, shopping. Even on Earth, she doubted mores were so lax that something would happen to her in public, in front of other people. Pain was a private thing, both the dealing of it and the recovering from it.

Realizing she was still following the half memory, half thought, she made an effort again to let it whisk away. It wasn't important. What was important was that she was here, on Earth, shopping.

Earth! Shopping! In the middle of the night, no less, as the city never slept. Nothing at all like Capella, where the shops closed before dinner. Nothing at all. It was wonderful just to walk around, in a clean-kept place with no dust, no ugliness for ugliness' sake (as the more extreme forms of the method would have it), with people more likely to accept rather then condemn.

On the way out of the shopping area, she dallied, looking into the windows of closed shops, caressing items with her eyes, soaking them into her memory. Most of the things she saw she had never seen before in her life. One of the shops, nearer to the hospital, had an assortment of medical goods and gifts. It was closed too, but when she passed a window stuffed full of plush animals, a good quarter of them started to move, as they picked up her movement, whirring their eyes, twitching their ears forward in interest, and making a faint chorus of comments, purrs, whistles, and more, heard faintly through the glass.

"Pukhas," Afra said.

Hemlata said nothing. How lucky the children who got those toys were! They spoke and moved and comforted, and were made out of fine synthetic materials. She remembered making do with cut outs of models from a bridal printout, glamorous but rumpled from wear, glued to plastic straws, and wedged into the desert dust. They had complained that they weren't dressed for the weather, and that the sand was itchy in their plastic and diamond sandals. Not too long after that they looked like something the dog had stolen and sat on, from all the times she hurriedly covered them with dirt or shoved them into her knickers to keep the men from seeing them.

As they walked back to the hospital, her intense curiosity about her surroundings faded, and started to be replaced by a distinctly alien feeling. Everything was so...clean. Not clean in the way the hot desert breezes of a colony planet were, or as in the rushing water of a stream washing away both heat and dirt--both wind and water smelled strange and acrid here, still polluted despite centuries' work and advancements in environmental science...you just couldn't have millions and millions of people living on top of one another without some pollution--but clean in a way that said it had been affected by human hands. Or maybe clean wasn't the word. There was a sense of alienness, as if she'd read and looked at vids of people who lived like this, but she had never been able to _touch_ it. To own it with her own eyes. It had always been confined within a holo's borders, with things out of sight.

It was strange to be _in_ it now, to be in a position where it might disown her as not being a part of it. Her dreams of being off of Capella couldn't disown her, or tell her she was a fool. The reality could. The reality had. She had been a Talent for a sweet number of weeks. Then their reality hit her reality, and rejected her as flawed. And here she was, part of nothing again.

The people they walked past, she knew wouldn't comprehend it. How lucky they were, to walk about free, with trendy clothes where long-wearing materials didn't matter, eating healthy and tasty food, in such a fascinating, accepting environment. She saw a group of teenagers, a few years older then her, moaning and complaining about how unfair it was that they had to be home by one in the morning, and that their mother was a drunken bouzma for not allowing them to wear their piercings to classes. Boo-effing-hoo. She had a sudden, sharp urge to shove them, to kick them, to beat them into the ground for their trivial complaints. Oh no! The world was coming apart--they were grounded for two weeks and had no entertainment access at home! Oh no! The horror!

She eavesdropped on the group of teenagers, growing angrier and angrier as they shared their pithy complaints with one another, as if the stupid little issues like the ones they had were grounds for the thick melodrama they affected.

She wondered what they would do, being made to work dawn to dusk by one man, then deluged in the scanty comforts a backwater mining post had by the second man, treated as a girl far younger then her years in a creepy, strange way, before the third man berated the second for coddling her in a screaming match while she tried not to get caught in the crossfire, or caught by a belt buckle as the third man tried to beat the faggot out of the second.

None of those teenagers knew pain, _none of them!_ They were like the second man, wound up in soft fantasies. She wondered how long they'd last if they ever felt real pain. Not for long, she was sure, with the weak way they emoted about the most trivial of things. Even their laughter was jarring and insulting. Whiny, stupid, little--

-

-

-

-

--the compartment of the capsule was warmer then the air outside, which was pleasant on toes chilled by the spring nighttime. Afra pulled the hatch closed, moved one of their shopping bags out of the way, and strapped himself in, next to her. She stared at him, disoriented and confused, and slightly scared.

"They will grow up," Mister Lyon assured her with an amused smile, as if some unknown period of time between the shopping center and this capsule hadn't elapsed, and everything was perfectly normal. "Right now they're floating in the space between childhood and adulthood; once they're adult and have to pay their own rent, cook their own food, and do their own laundry they'll be more appreciative of what it's like to have and have not. I had a similar outlook as you occasionally when I was younger, for those of my peers who were not raised in Methody families. I was astounded how they could take so much for granted, without even a thank you, or worse, with a curse for the one giving it to them."

Hemlata shivered with the leftover emotions that had been peaking before, but felt strangely calm now. As if she'd suddenly been rolled in a brown, heavy, reassuring blanket. One that held a faint scent of citrus, citrus that threaded through her nostrils even now. She wondered if it was the solvents used whenever the capsule had last been cleansed, or if Mr. Lyon put on a spritz of _eau de limon_ before he left the house. Maybe it was common, wherever he had lived after he got off of Capella.

It took a few long moments, but she eventually realized he was controlling her emotions. He had reached in and short-circuited the anger, wiping it out of her mind like a sponge wiping away spilled flour from the countertop, leaving it clean for inconsequential and harmless thoughts like the image of him squeezing a lemon at his neck after shaving. He was a telepath, he had heard her thoughts, and had taken action.

She felt a sudden mingled shame and fear. The men had been able to read her expressions, when she chose to make them (which is why she rarely chose to make them), but never her thoughts. She had been able to say nothing with her face and body, obedient in all ways to the outsider, and rail against them in her mind, but now even that refuge in her mind was not a place of safety.

Her mind was no longer a refuge. She hadn't realized that on Capella, in the Tower. Maybe if she had, things would have gone differently.

"I am calming you, yes. And I am keeping a light touch on your public mind. What would you have done to those people if I hadn't?" His tone was reproving.

_I don't know_, she thought, sullenly. "I didn't want to hurt them."

He stared at her for a very long moment. "Hmmmm...yes you did."

She didn't know what to say to that, and crossed her arms over her chest, looking anywhere but him. He had caught her in a lie. She wondered what the punishment would be, and if the first words out of her...her foster mother's mouth would be a sentence of some sort.

They were waiting for a generator to come online, he told her after a while, not saying anything one way or another about the thoughts she knew he was hearing, and she listened to the sound as it powered up. She wondered if it were common for lone generators to start up at night. In the capsule, he connected the com to the FT&T systems with a vocal phrase that obviously identified his voice ("Authorized," the VA system said smoothly back to them in an alto voice), and the screens showed various things such as capsule mass, location, destination (the destination was a numeric format, 0382.23.TT.193-WP, unlike the location, which said "Earth Tower, cradle DP-KWY3LN-SE, capsule DP-DARL02-IA) and a graph with generator output.

"I'm going to be taking us partway, and my wife Damia will take us from there," he explained as he went through some sort of well-worn ritual on the panels. Then he sat back in his chair.

She watched, waiting for something to happen.

A moment later, the generators peaked, and the location and destination on the screen changed. Their location was now that number, with a picture of a binary star in it, shining closer then a star, but farther then a sun. Their new destination was "Aurigae Tower, cradle DP-PF02-IA, capsule DP-DARL02-IA".

A moment later, the screens flickered again, and said they were now at Aurigae Tower. She hadn't felt any movement either time--only the flickering of the screens had let her know she was being transported.

Mister Lyon unbuckled himself, which she took as an invitation to do the same thing, and while she did that, all the bags suddenly disappeared. "Damia took them, so we don't have to carry them all the way to the house," he said. "One thing before we exit into the tower--"

--she suddenly remembered her promise to relay Mr. Gren's hello, rather irrelevantly--

"--the other two adults in our household are Flkm and Trp." The two alien names were alarming in the middle of his sentence. One moment he was speaking perfect Basic, with a slightly different but not unpleasant accent then the one she was used to, and then his throat made noises only children made at one another when they were being wild and silly, and he strung them into alien words, before resuming his Basic sentence in a pleasant tenor.

_Fffft-ellllll-kum and T-arrrr-p?_ she thought. She wasn't sure she could get her mouth even close.

"They are Mrdini, and they understand Basic about as well as I understand 'Dini, which is to say, better then I can speak it. We expect you to be polite."

"Yes sir," she said.

"Well then--yes?"

He'd picked up her need to comply with Gollee Gren's request to say hello (now that she remembered it). "Mister Gren said to say hello," Hemlata said. "I forgot until now, I'm sorry."

Mister Lyon smiled suddenly, laugh lines crinkling in the corners of his eyes. "Did he?" He managed both to smile rather broadly, and give off a more Capellan air of restrained amusement. She wasn't sure how that worked. "We had to fight over you, you know. He wanted to take you home to meet his family too."

"...oh..."

"Speaking of which, welcome to Iota Aurigae. My wife Damia welcomes you as well," and his eyes suddenly became distant for a moment, "And bids us to hurry up, dinner is getting cold. I suggest we get a move on."

"Yes sir," she said again, and followed him out of the capsule and out of the Tower into the late afternoon sun of the third planet she'd been on in three days.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter Five**

"Those are...very proper," Damia said dubiously of the clothing they had bought for Hemlata, after dinner had been eaten and the girl shown her room and bed.

Afra looked amused. "She was trying to make me read her real preferences out of her mind, like a three year old. And like a three year old, I made her vocalize. I think she's satisfied with them on another level, however; I surprised myself on my first shopping trip to Earth...everything I bought would have fit in fine at my parent's or sisters's place!"

"I doubt that's true now."

"You have broadened my horizons, my love," he said, pulling her close and giving her a kiss on the white streak in her hair.

_Did she give you any trouble?_ she asked, resting her chin on his shoulder.

_Less then expected given what your father said of her mind, more then what a similar personality with a better past would have given me. She blurted out to a saleswoman who asked her about the bandage around her head that, 'My Talent was burned out because I'm a future menace to society.'_ He mimicked Hemlata's tone and delivery in his mind, so his wife could hear it.

He felt Damia's shock clearly. "She didn't!"

"She did, she was testing me." _I prevented the saleswoman from hearing it, however, so no worries about that._

"Was that the only thing?"

She felt Afra's hesitation, the pause in his mind as he chose which thoughts and words to present to her. _Did you touch her mind?_ He asked, finally.

_Not deeply; the dampers they implanted on her make me feel...dizzy, almost._

Afra pushed her away by the shoulders far enough so that he could look her in the face. "Really."

"They don't affect you?"

"I can feel that she's being suppressed, but other then that, no."

They were both silent, as a half-formed thought flew around and between their minds.

"Did Gollee--?"

"He didn't mention anything. But Hemlata was dizzy when she woke up. I assumed it was due to a mild reaction to the medication they used to put her under..." _But maybe that assumption was incorrect._

_I can't believe dad wouldn't tell us about anti-Prime technology,_ Damia said, frowning.

_We can't be sure,_ Afra hedged. _A sample of four is too small. We could as easily say it's anti-female technology, given Gollee and I are male, and you two, female. _He gave her a small half-smile. _But when we go to Luciano's next week to have dinner with Jeff, Gollee, and Elizara next week, I think we should bring it up._

_Or next time I hear from dad._

_I think we should save this one for face-to-face, my love, when the tower crews aren't around, just in case._

"My crew wouldn't leak!" Damia said, affronted. "_You_ know that. Even if they did pick something up, which is unlikely."

_Us lesser Talents pick up more then you know. But--_"I didn't mean to imply that they would leak. I just don't think..." and he shook his head. _If this is what we think it is, Jeff probably has a good reason to keep it under wraps. I could see David, Capella, and the Rowan all having fits about it, in different flavors of course._

Damia sniggered at the mental image of different flavored fits, not quite hiding it behind her hand.

_However, if the dizzy sensation isn't something you can't move beyond, I would give Hemlata's mind a probe. You'll pick up things that I did not. She's very angry, inside, and her environment, particularly other people, trigger her. We come across a group of teenagers, being teenagers, and it stirred up such a mix of rage, jealousy, and pain that I 'ported us into the capsule immediately and leaned on her so she calmed down. I'm afraid she would have done something crass, otherwise._

"I thought Capellans weren't prone to emotional displays."

"That's easier said then done when you've been mistreated as badly as she has."

Damia looked thoughtful, then nodded. _Agreed._ "They would have locked my Talent up too, if I had been in her shoes," she said, her voice soft. "I would have probably gone to trial for the murder of those three miners, actually. She just ran away, across the desert, with no shoes."

"I believe she levitated..."

"Shoeless." She gave a small smile.

"Being shoeless in the desert is a good reason to levitate," Afra said sensibly. "I've never been to the arid spans, but they tell me it's hot there," and he gave a small half smile.

"I think she startled a band of supplicants traveling to some shrine, who thought she was some manifestation of their god for a moment. At least, that was flying around dad's mind when I first heard about her." _He thought it amusing that that could even happen. Capella has its own Prime, after all..._

_People who want change colonize. Some people want changes that are unrealistic,_ he said, referring to the fact that a lot of cultures unwelcome on their home planet emigrated, and sometimes deeply colored a new planet's fledgling culture. Such as with Capella and its methody people. The puritans got kicked out of England, settled America, then their descendents got kicked out of America a few hundred years later, and settled Capella. "We need to keep a sharp eye on our young goddess. And our kids, once one of them comes home for a visit. Our kids have good heads on their shoulders, but sometimes they, too, assume things, and the last thing we need is a fight that alienates Hemlata from them and us."

"This is going to be a tough one..." Damia said with a sigh.

"She deserves someone to fight for her, my love."

"I don't disagree. I just think it's going to be rocky. I don't want to lose my temper with her, and I think I may. You know I don't like it when people act one way, and think another." _They feel sneaky_.

"We'll work it out," Afra promised.

Damia nodded absently and poked through some more of the clothing Afra had gotten for Hemlata.

"Do you think I made a bad choice?" Afra said suddenly, picking up one of the plainly colored, modest shirts. "With the clothes? I admit I've never been a twelve year old girl..."

"Mmmm...I would hope not."

"...although Ackerman mistook me for a twenty year old woman, once..." he mused, putting the shirt down, and looking at a pair of pants.

"...what? When? How did that happen?" _You'd make an ugly woman._

"Oh I made a remark that if I was giving birth, et cetera, and he looked at me like I had two heads for the next week or so. Once I learned about his cousin it made a bit more sense, but still. Ancient history though, from around when Jeran was born, and I've never been a woman."

"Can I quote you on that?" Damia asked, possibly too seriously.

"...yesss..." Afra said slowly, eyeing his mischievous-looking wife.

"Ah. Good. Let's get these clothes put away..." And she started teleporting clothing into Hemlata's closet, packing the small items away expertly, while Afra wondered what sort of prank he'd have to dodge in the near future from his young-at-heart wife.

**Author's Notes:**

Thank you all for reviewing so far :)

firelizardkimi - Hemlata has certainly been given a bad hand of cards in the game of life. This takes place after The Tower and the Hive, however. So there's still a gazillion Primes running around, but their lives seem to be a bit charmed. I wanted to connect their rather charmed life life to the life of the little talents who don't have all the advantages, the ones from The Rowan and the Pegasus books. :)

ginalee - Thanks for reviewing - twice! Hemlata's upset, but she's not one to angst 24/7. And she counts her blessings--out of the arid spans her life is so much better, even counting the suppressed Talent thing. Sorry I didn't show Damia/Hemlata meeting; it just wasn't very spectacular, everyone was on their best behavior. But there'll be future conflict, believe you me!

Multi-Facets - If you find out what you find so compelling, I'd indeed want to know! Unfortunately in regards to Mrdini dreams, Hemlata is a bit of a xenophobe.

Doyoueverwonder - Thank you :)

Ten Toes - That's a very high compliment indeed! Thank you. :) I hope to publish my original stories someday, but for now I'm playing in AMC's world.

Amere Mortal - Telling me I write like a pro is a good way to win my heart. :D ::writes faster::

PernDragonrider - I have a lot planned. Hopefully it'll be something everyone enjoys!


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**

Mister Kabanov stared at Hemlata from across his desk. "I've never had occasion to send Mr. and Mrs. Lyon a note of this sort before. All of them were pretty much the same--excepting Ewain," and a ghost of a smile drifted across his severe face for a moment. "Over achievers, except for Rojer who learned his lesson about himself being here for the class, and not because he's a walking specimen for the young ladies to study. So what do you have to say for yourself?"

"About what, sir?" asked Hemlata politely, her face blank.

"About not turning in your homework for this week?"

Hemlata looked at his eyes, and thought about her first week of school on Aurigae. The fight with Damia that had popped out of nowhere, when she'd said, a little too fiercely, that the reason she chose the class was because she _didn't_ want to hear it from the horse's mouth--after all, it was the horses who had expelled her from the herd. It was difficult to complete an essay about the Talent's effects on modern life knowing everyone in the house--everyone _human_ that was--could read her thoughts about her essay as she formulated them, and she found it difficult to believe that Damia wouldn't be watching her like a hawk, thoughts and all, now that she'd mouthed off like that.

It'd been easy after that to fall into old habits of procrastinating, and finally just not doing the homework. She did the work for other classes, and the Lyons had had no reason to believe she hadn't done all of it, and they were eager to present the facade of trusting her.

"What about Ewain and Rojer?" Hemlata said, now sure if she wanted to lie or not yet, and also curious that he was maybe comparing her to those two particular Raven-Lyon scions.

Or maybe he wasn't. He flicked his fingers in dismissal. "I'm not here to discuss pupils long away and grown. And you likely know enough of them, growing up in the family," he said.

"I'm not related to them," she said. It wasn't the first time this week she'd had to explain the matter. Despite the fact that she looked nothing like the Raven-Lyons, people assumed she was A) a Talent, and B) related by blood the moment they found out she was living with the Prime of Aurigae and her husband.

"Oh?"

"I'm from Capella, sir."

"So is Mister Lyon. Although of course, you're right, that doesn't make you related, nor is Capella known for cousins marrying cousins so that everyone is related to everyone. That would be Deneb."

Hemlata wondered if he knew about Rojer and Asia, whom she'd heard briefly about from Afra and Damia, or if it was chance he said that. His face didn't lead to a conclusion either way.

"But again, why did you not do your homework?"

On a whim, she chose the truth. This time. "They wanted to help."

"Their children as examples, I doubt you mean to cheat."

"They disagreed with some of the text," Hemlata said, pinning some of the blame on Afra despite that he hadn't been in the house at the time. "But being Talents themselves, I think they're biased. I took this class so I could see what non-Talents think."

"...and not because your situation living with Talents would make this an easily won mark?"

She shrugged, wondering if that's what most of the Raven-Lyon children had done. She wanted to explain that she didn't know who they were, not really, and felt appalled that the urge was there to explain anything. She wasn't sure if she was appalled that she would, effectively, sell them short so easily by implying the lack of trust was there, to a teacher about Talent no less, or that she had the urge to give up her private thoughts so easily to someone who couldn't pluck them out of her head. All in all she felt slightly out of control, as if she wanted to blurt things to someone she didn't have to live with, just to get them out of her head.

As if her thoughts didn't come drifting out of her head anyway, audible to any Talent who could hear.

Of course, a teacher she would have to live with too, in a way, until the class was ended, if she told him things. "What's my punishment?" she asked instead, keeping the blurting, bleating sheep inside.

He looked disturbed that she would ask that so calmly. "I'll give you the weekend to finish it. You may stay after to use the library com if you wish, I will give you a pass. But I must have it on Monday, and this mustn't happen again."

Hemlata nodded politely, and thanked him, and wandered off to the library with the pass he gave her, doubting she'd be able to finish it by Monday. Her thoughts kept getting complicated when it came to Talents, and she had a bizarre little fear that thinking of Talents would make them think of her. They were only a thought away, after all, as she'd heard Afra quip at his wife once or twice.

Once in the library, she occupied a com and roamed where her thoughts took her. About two hours later, she came across the cliché "tin foil cap", and wondered if a tin foil cap would keep Talents out. With a bit more digging, she found that indeed, such things existed, in the form of a steel skullcap. Research into case studies of the more psychotic type of folks who resisted being medicated, but weren't quite dangerous enough for a governmental order of any sort to force medication threw up a few pictures of hats ranging from caps medically proven against telepathic Talents to bizarre oddities made by paranoid amateurs that wouldn't work better then putting a steel pasta sieve over your head would work.

"Oh, Paul Drotterburg, he's like my personal god," the sudden enthusiastic voice of a boy whose voice hadn't dropped yet said over her shoulder. She froze, startled adrenaline pounding in her veins, then casually scanned back through the pictures and captions to find a hat that was both functional and pseudo-trendy, with a citation of the aforementioned Drotterburg as the maker.

"What, you put up a little idol and everything?" Hemlata asked, surprised that she didn't stammer on the word idol. She'd always been a bit of a heretic in her thoughts, but it'd never left her lips before now. She turned to look at him over her shoulder.

The kid laughed. "Nah. Not unless I have an audience I want to fake out," and he grinned, a genuinely amused grin. "I have one of his hats though."

"Really?" asked Hemlata.

"Yeah. Anyone using this com?"

"No."

"Neat." And he flung his bag on the table, and sat next to her.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**

Afra looked over the top of his menu at his youngest son Ewain, whose expression looked curiously constipated for some reason. He did a quick mental once-over to see if everything was ok, but his son's mind was closed tight as a steel drum, so he didn't probe further, respecting Ewain's privacy, and decided if it was really important, it would probably out itself later on in the day. Ewain, despite his physical similarities to his father, tended to be outgoing and spontaneous in a way that sometimes heart-rendingly reminded him of Damia's deceased brother Larak.

_We gave the name to the wrong kid,_ Damia agreed, her mental voice holding a slight tinge of sadness even after all these years.

_I don't think Laria's going to give it up at this late date, _Afra said, bleeding mischievous lavender amusement into his words. _Is he going to stay for the full dinner, do you think? If we all start that conversation I wanted to have with your father, he's going to notice something, no matter how well we shield and keep our lips flapping while our minds do the talking._

_For shame! His own father, not wanting him around_, Damia teased._ He'll end up with some sort of complex._

Afra didn't reply to his wife's prodding, as Jeff and the Rowan were threading their way through the tables towards them, an enthusiastic Luciano beside them for part of the way until he turned and disappeared into the kitchens.

"Grandson," Jeff said, ruffling Ewain's white-streaked hair while the young man rolled his eyes. "Gollee said you were here, but why didn't you come say hello to your old grandpa? Scootch in," and he swatted Ewain's leg so that they could share one side of the booth. Ewain scootched.

"Because you were in the midst of 'porting those drones to Aunt Cera, and I figured appearing in your office, going boogly boo! and setting off the alarms wouldn't be protective for those drones making it to Procyon in one piece."

"He thinks alarms going off would make me drop the drones," Jeff told the Rowan drolly, who smacked Ewain lightly in the head and then kissed his cheek before taking a seat at the foot of the table. "Speaking of Gollee, where is he?"

_Speaking to a governmental turd who thinks his shipment warrants some sort of special contract because he works for the government. Why did I choose to walk out the front door today? Oh yes, the weather's great, it'll be a beautiful day to take a rented sled and hang my head out the door like a dog in the wind, taking in the sights and scents. If I had just teleported it would have been so much easier, one of our desk jockeys would be speaking to this guy now._

"Dog in the wind?" asked Ewain.

"He's been reading some sort of poetry," Afra said, but that didn't really enlighten anyone. The Rowan was giggling, while politely keeping the giggles out of her mental touch.

_Do you need some help?_ Jeff asked. _I can manufacture an emergency._

"Emergency!" Ewain said in his best comedic voice. "All hands on deck. Take cover. Thar she blows. Arrrr." _I'm not sure where the pirate stuff came in, but I can run with it._

_Thanks guys, now I'm trying not to laugh in his face. No need for emergencies, or pirate brigades, if I can't shake him off in a minute or so more, it's time for me to retire, preferably to somewhere warm and sunny with many beautiful--_

_Don't let your wife hear that,_ the Rowan warned.

_She's bi._

_Too much info! _ Both Ewain and Damia protested.

_Speaking of that, Ewain..._Gollee continued.

"_Ack!"_ Ewain said both mentally and verbally, hiding behind his menu while Afra peered at his son curiously again, seeing the constipated look reappear on Ewain's face.

Gollee chuckled in their heads. And then a few moments later, he walked into the restaurant, self-consciously picking the FT&T pins off his collar and stuffing them into a pocket, before joining them at the table. "By what honor do I get the head of the table?"

"Is it? Both ends look the same to me," Ewain said.

"In actuality I'm sitting at the head," the Rowan said. "Gren's just being chauvinistic."

"Ow," Gollee said. "How'd I deserve that?"

Dinner was excellent, as always as Luciano's was a top notch restaurant, and they generally joked and bickered their way through the meal like old friends and family were wont to do. Afra did manage to give Jeff a mental tap on the shoulder to let him know there was something he wanted to discuss, and they managed to take a break for the men's room together at one point, leaving poor Ewain to Gollee's surprisingly unmerciful teasing.

"Why's G ripping on E?" Jeff asked Afra. "He looks a bit put out."

"Ewain hasn't let anything drop all evening, nor Gollee, but I have my suspicions."

"Your suspicions are often more correct then other's guarantees."

"I think Gollee took him on a guided tour of the town."

"Ewain's been here before," Jeff said, puzzled. "What wouldn't he have seen yet?"

"Well, you were already involved when you came here," Afra said. "So I doubt you ever got the full tour."

Jeff was quiet, taking in the implications of "involved". "I...see. Are my suspicions now correct?"

"Your suspicions are often more correct then other's guarantees," Afra quipped back, with a shrug that could have meant anything. "Anyway, speculation about Ewain aside, could Damia and I have a word with you and Gollee later on? I was hoping at dinner, but then," and he shrugged.

"Is it about the girl?" Jeff asked, his face becoming serious.

"Indirectly."

"How is she doing?"

"It's only been two weeks, she's still adjusting I'd say. She and Damia fought, but I was expecting that, Hemlata's a stronger personality then she seems at first."

Jeff snorted.

_She's paranoid about Talents, _Afra said. _Which isn't surprising--_

_--Damn, I--_

_No, Jeff, there's nothing else you could have done. And this is better then having her Talent entirely burned out. Maybe I'm foolish, but I hope that maybe someday...well. What I wanted to talk about is related to that._

Jeff was quiet for a long few moments. _Ah. I was hoping you wouldn't spot that._

Afra gave Jeff a sidelong glance, and for a few minutes neither said anything, busy taking care of business as it were.

As Afra followed Jeff out of the men's room, wiping his hands on a towel as he did so (and 'porting it into a trash can behind him), he broached the subject again. _That's one dangerous secret._

_It is. But the trick is you have to get the Prime to sit still for the procedure, which as you know is a difficult task...unless you're manhandling scared little children._ It seemed Jeff was still angry with his decision to neuter Hemlata's abilities.

_Isn't self-flagellation about things over and done my line?_ Afra squeezed Jeff's shoulder once, in a brief physical contact, and as they rejoined the table, they dropped the subject. The Rowan, who seemed to have rallied to Ewain's defense, was making a scathing riposte in Gollee's direction, and Gollee winced dramatically.

As dinner wound down, Jeff managed to snag Afra and Gollee, saying something about an old men's club and manly chitchat, which effectively excluded the Rowan, Ewain, and Damia, but Damia let Afra know privately that she'd send her mother and son on their way, then circle back and meet them where ever.

"So, what," Damia told her father later when the four of them were firmly ensconced on the couches of one of Blundell's most secure meeting rooms, "there's been this big secret since the time of Henry Darrow or Peter Reidinger the First, about this device that can stop Primes cold?"

"Um, what?" Gollee said, surprised.

Jeff shook his head, stopping Damia's sentence. "Not really, just ten years, although it's something that most every Earth Prime has had to worry about. Just in case."

"We're talking about the device we used in lieu of burnout, aren't we?" Gollee asked.

"Yes," Afra said.

"Damn. And now here we are, talking about stopping Primes without the hypnosis and other things involved? Why didn't I notice it could do that, or more specifically, why wasn't I told?"

Jeff grimaced.

"I suspect you didn't notice it for the same reason I didn't notice it until Damia said something," Afra said dryly. "We're not Primes. And also, not being Primes, people like you or I getting our hands on it represent the highest security risk there is in regards to the device. We're Talent enough to get close to a Prime to use it, and our Talent will keep on ticking if this device is enabled over a wide area, whereas a Prime will be stopped cold. Or am I wrong, and ascribing the device more powers then it actually has?"

"In higher concentrations it does affect non-Primes, working the way down the ranks in relation to the power used. But to deploy it in such a manner would require hooking it into generator-size power supplies, which is noticeable. So essentially yes, you're correct Afra."

"Tell me that my sudden urge to sic Xexo--and Rojer--on every square inch of my Tower is just paranoia," Damia said. Xexo was their crack Tower engineer, and Rojer had already displayed a lot of talent with hiver technology.

Jeff looked annoyed. "I wouldn't do that to you, my dear, hell even Reidinger wouldn't have done that and he was even more controlling of his empire then I am."

"I'm sorry, father...it's just..." she shook her head.

"I'm still surprised I wasn't told," Gollee said. "Being as I act as the head of security, among other things, here at Blundell. It's difficult to do my job if I'm lacking vital intelligence."

Jeff nodded in weary agreement. "To be honest it's been sitting in the deepest, darkest medical vault for a while. I didn't expect...well, I didn't expect a young little Prime to grow up in near slavery with a bunch of lunatics from some ack-basswards desert on Capella. For some reason I thought our modern society was beyond that. Funny how I was wrong."

"That's something pre-cogs should have caught," Damia said, unaware that she was echoing an earlier conversation.

"So it was there, just in case. Sometimes obscurity is the best security, at least as a first tier of defense. And I haven't told all the Primes yet because--"

"--someone will leak," Gollee said, with a sigh. "Some of them will get upset, and it will leak out to their crew in an unguarded moment, and god forbid we have another Clarissa among them looking for a bit of juicy intel like that, just waiting to strike," he said, referring to a Capellan T-2 who had plotted to assassinate Jeff and the Rowan (among others) and had even managed to breach a secure room before being detained.

"Afra said something similar," Damia said.

"But why didn't you tell me?" Gollee said again.

"I should have. I'm sorry Gren. That's my misjudgement."

"So now we have the technology in the wild, so to speak," Afra said, moving things forward. "In the event that something happened to Hemlata, what's the likelihood that a random physician would be able to decipher what the thing does? Well, scratch that, all it'll take is a peek in Hemlata's medical records to see that she has Talent, even though the record says burned out, it's not a stretch for a person with eyes and a brain to put two and two together. What's the likelihood of an engineer replicating it?"

"Depends on the engineer, it does share a base with the household dampers we use. An engineer with a degree in parapsychic engineering would have a good base. So would a xeno-engineer."

"Sting-pzzt?" Afra asked.

"I would have sensed that," Damia countered.

"You kept making that my-mouth-tastes-funny look when you touched the dampers with your mind."

"Hm."

"Afra's correct again; one of the medics investigating that phenomenon wondered if there could be any psychically repulsive properties to hiver metal, aside from the mal-odorously repulsive aspects for Talents in its vicinity. Truth be told, it's not all that hard to reproduce, it relies on its sting-pzzt-like properties to...disorient the Talent enough for the dampers to contain it in one skull. The hypnotics are there as a failsafe, in case something happens to the dampers--they're fairly close to the surface, under the skin. Hypnotics should contain the urge to use Talent unless there's a grave emergency that alters the mindscape--much like some are Talented but it doesn't show up until a time of duress brings it forth."

"We're talking about Hemlata again. How is she doing?" Gren asked.

"As well as to be expected in only two weeks. She's paranoid about us reading her thoughts," Damia said.

"She doesn't have a shield?"

"Strangely no, without her Talent active she seems to lack a natural shield."

"That's my fault," Afra said.

"How is her not having a shield your fault, Afra?"

"I mean about the paranoia against thought-reading. When we were leaving, we happened past a group of teenagers, and she nearly threw a fit. I reacted...strongly. I had been trying to minimize using telepathy obviously in her presence, but the direction her thoughts were going, and her attempt to lie to me made my use of Talent to extract us from the situation blatant. She places a high regard in the sanctity of her thoughts, particularly as she's schooled herself in not showing her thoughts on her face or in her body posture, and I treated her as a young Talent, keeping tabs on her surface mind, rather then as a non-Talent as her outlook on things would more warrent. Now she thinks we're watching her every public thought." Afra frowned. "And private, too."

"We are. The public at least."

"I think it's the wrong tack to take, now. We're treating her as a high Talent, attempting to root out subversive mindsets before they can flower. The problem is, the subversive mindsets have already rooted, and when we attempt to adjust her thinking, I'm afraid she'll take it as an attack upon _herself,_ her personality."

"You may want to talk to Elizara about this," Jeff advised.

"Yes."

They were all quiet for a while, thinking of Hemlata, and raising Talented children, and of the havoc this little Prime mind-blocker device could create in the hands of their enemies.

"I would assume it's given that outside this room, you don't mention this to anyone," Jeff finally said. "Speaking as Earth Prime, here."

"I don't like it, but I suppose I understand," Damia said a bit reluctantly. "Can you tell Laria, at least? I trust _our_ Mrdinis implicitly, but on Clarf there's only a very small Human contingent, and many, many Mrdinis of all outlooks. As an ambassador in many ways, I fear she would be more of a target then any but you yourself, dad."

"I'll consider it. If I tell her I'll likely tell Thian as well."

On that note, they cleaned up the scattered coffees and teas they'd been nursing, and left for their respective homes and beds, as it was getting late, particularly so for Jeff and Gollee on Earth, as their business day started several hours before Iota Aurigae's this time of year.

**Author's notes:** Sorry it took so long to update! And thanks to everyone who reviewed in the meantime.

I'm really pleased with how this chapter goes; how I actually managed to write dialogue for _six characters_ in that dinner scene, I haven't a clue, because my personal style typically makes that really, really difficult. (I prefer my characters speaking one-on-one or at the most, one-to-two.) I must have absorbed some of AMC's talent with such situations, or at least played her characters right for it to come easily, at least for this chapter.

Ewain I'm totally running with, as he and Petra are pretty much the only Raven-Lyon kids that don't have a personality yet. Hope you like him.

And I hope the comic relief isn't out of place; I can only keep a story serious and dreary for so long before I have to have someone crack a smile. Jeff sometimes gets overly serious with the whole Earth Prime thing, which is a pity as he was fun in _The Rowan_, but I figure Gollee will always know how to blow off some steam. And then there's Afra with his drier wit.

Also, apologies about the shift in font face; it's arial in my document, but seems to not be carrying that over here, even when I try to insert the html code myself. :-/


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter Eight**

Sammon Henderson was a trickster, liar, and weasel (but not weasel-lover, as he liked to point out). But he was honest about it, if you could be an honest liar, and he wasn't intimidated by her foster parents, and indeed found it absolutely hilarious when he twigged to the fact that she didn't particularly like them, a quarter of the school year later.

"Do you want to borrow my hat?" he asked after he found out this fact, referring to the artistic-but-functional cap to keep wandering Talents out of the mind that he had mentioned in their first encounter. His "tin foil cap".

Hemlata wanted to borrow it, but had enough foresight to realize it would be a huge slap in the face to her foster parents. Who _were_ housing, feeding, and educating her after all. "I don't think it would be a good idea," she said, repressively.

He laughed. "What are they going to do? Ground you? You've been grounded you said--does it still scare you?" His grin was cocky.

No, she had indefinite patience and grounding was a temporary thing. Afra and Damia Lyon had few punishments in their arsenal that she truly feared, and they'd never stoop to physical means to discipline her. It was just that...wearing the hat around them was going too far, almost. She had the deep-set urge to defy them, just like she'd defied everyone else in her life, but her gut warned that she couldn't really, truly expect what they would do if she insulted them, even if her mind logically replied it wouldn't be bad at all, compared to what she was used to. The primal fear of them doing something really bad to her was deep and irrational.

But she really, really did want the hat. She _hated_ the thought of them being in her mind. Her mind was the only thing that was _hers_, that would _remain_ hers if she suddenly just ran away into the wilderness. Her shirt, her shoes, the barrette holding her hair in place--none of those were hers, they'd all been given to her, and if she had to, she could drop them all in a moment and never see any physical possession again. But her mind and her self would be hers forever.

"You dread being grounded, that is so puny," Sam said, goading her.

"I do not," she said, irritated.

"Oh woe is me, I'm grounded!" His hand fluttered around in an effeminate gesture around his forehead.

"I can take being grounded," Hemlata said.

"Okay, I'll bring the hat tomorrow then," he said, dropping the fainting act and nodding sagely.

Hemlata blinked. "...what?"

"And how's this...if you wear the hat around them, and get a holo of it, with one of them in the holo zone, I will _give_ you the hat. Like, for keeps. I swear. Pinky-swear, even."

Hemlata stared at Sam with wide eyes. That was beyond a slap in the face, this was a spitting-in-their-food type of insult. Or maybe peeing-on-their-rug type of insult.

"I get to keep a copy of the holo, of course."

They would be _furious_. Hemlata couldn't really comprehend the audacity it would take to do it.

"C'mon, you're one of the bravest girls I know, you can do it."

The unexpected compliment took Hemlata off guard. Brave? She wasn't brave. She eyed Sam, sure he was lying, but for some reason her mouth of its own initiative said, "Okay. You bring the hat in, and if I give you a holo of me wearing it around one of them, I get to keep the hat. I also get your fruit from lunch for the next month." She stared at him, as if her steady stare would make his acceptance of her requirements more likely to be held up on his end, if he accepted.

And he did, in a heartbeat, as if he had been expecting more resistance, or a sacrifice larger than his servings of fruit at lunch. That made her scowl inside. "Haha, deal!" he grabbed her hand and squished it. "I'll bring it in tomorrow. Wear something purple, or whatever you girls do to match clothes." And with a wicked grin, he ran off.

Hemlata supposed she could just "forget" to bring it back for a string of days. Try it out, see how it worked. Get lice on purpose so she wouldn't have to bring it back. Or something.

She felt a sudden blush darken her cheeks at her rather shady thoughts, but she didn't run after Sam to call it off. She really did want to try the hat out, even if she had to return it because she didn't get the holo he wanted.

Hemlata watched the way he had run off, and tried to convince herself that when push came to shove, she would be honest and give the hat back. But she couldn't entirely convince or trust herself that she would. She wondered what he would do to get it back, if she refused to. And she wondered if she'd be forced to give it back to him by the Lyons, not because they were offended by the hat, but merely because it wasn't hers.

She found that hilarious for some reason, and kept erupting in private giggles to herself throughout the rest of the day.

---------

If Sammon's steel-boned hat was offensive to Talents, it certainly wasn't because of the style. Hemlata got a surprising amount of compliments on it as she wore it around the school after lunch the next day, and Sam kept grinning like a fool every time he saw her in it. She started to giggle nervously around him when their eyes met, which unfortunately caused some of the other kids to start shipping them as a couple. Hemlata ignored this fiercely, and the other kids fell silent until she passed almost out of earshot. Then they started talking about her and Sam again. Sam seemed entirely oblivious to the whispers though, which wasn't surprising considering he was a boy.

She almost left the hat at school though, not knowing what to say to whomever picked her up, before realizing that if she _didn't_ have the hat, she would be thinking about it, and then they would know for sure. Maybe they wouldn't notice they couldn't hear her thoughts. She had learned, in her class about Talents, that some people had "natural shields". Maybe her hat would make her seem like she had one. But did people always have a natural shield, from day one, or did they spontaneously develop out of the blue? Because her Talent had been burned out, would that burn out any possible shield, too? She decided no, because her book about Talents mentioned a man who was not considered Talented, but had a shield nonetheless.

When she saw it was Damia picking her up today, however, she almost took off the hat and stuffed it in her bag. As much as you could stuff anything that had a thin steel bowl in it in a bag. In her estimation, Damia would be the one more likely to blow her top about it. But Damia didn't say anything immediately when Hemlata gingerly climbed into the sled, and it wasn't until they were two thirds of the way home that Damia commented on it.

"The hat looks nice on you. Where did you get it?"

Hemlata glanced at Damia for a second, brown eyes meeting blue, before looking away. She wondered if Damia thought she had stolen it. "A friend let me borrow it," she said warily.

"That's nice; what's her name?"

The incorrect pronoun dropped into Hemlata's lap like a gift. She tried not to smile too obviously. "His name is Sam." It was only as the words left her mouth that she wondered if Damia would assume he was her boyfriend. That made her scowl.

"Must be a boy with style."

Hemlata didn't want to reply, but not replying when spoken to was rude. "He has his own style, yes," she hedged. Manipulative kid.

The rest of the ride home was spent in silence, and once they were home they both dispersed to their regular pre-dinner chores. Hemlata spent time in the stables vacuuming up clods of horse doo-doo while thinking about how to get one or both of the senior Lyons in front of a holo-recorder. With her. In the hat.

She didn't get the holo taken that night; before dinner she quickly put away the hat and tried to concentrate on the food, or her homework, or showering, or anything but the hat, in case anyone was reading her mind. But at school the next day she wore it proudly, enjoying the unusual compliments while she thought of a plan to achieve her goal. Because she was fairly certain she _did_ want the hat. Perhaps it was just her imagination, but everyday _coincidences_ seemed to be slightly lower for yesterday. She really hoped it wasn't her imagination.

"Did you get it?" Sam asked her at lunch.

"Be patient," she chided.

"Just askin'," he said.

Her goal of winning their...wager...and keeping the prize occupied most of her spare time in the school day. It might be easier to get one of the Lyons' kids into the holo room with her. She wondered if that would count. Kaltia, perhaps. She'd only met the woman once, but Hemlata felt that all of the Lyons she'd met so far, she was the one it would be easiest to trick. She wasn't young enough that she was almost a peer to Hemlata, like Petra and Ewain were, nor was she as Damia-like as Morag, or as old and adult as Zara and Rojer.

But on the other hand, she rarely saw Kaltia or any of Afra and Damia's children. So she couldn't really say how easy it would be to trick her. When she had run away from home, on Capella, she had planned it for months, and knew every tic and nuance of her "caregivers'" personalities. She knew that a flask of whisky hidden between couch cushions was a good thing, even if it left her clothes smelling of alcohol if she had to sit near it, and that an open bottle of wine a very bad thing, despite the apparently contrary levels of alcohol in them. The wine was bad because it meant someone had attempted a date. It didn't matter how well it went, if the woman seemed to be receptive or not; deep, burning depression always followed, and usually exploded open on her, behind closed doors, since she was the only female representative in the household. The whiskey was alright though, because Capellan men were good at not drinking spirits to excess, so the alcohol never really had an effect on things aside from making them sleepy.

She also knew if one of the others had left very early, he'd come home very late, because he only left early if things were getting bad for him because he was being harassed by one of the other men, and if they were bad he'd linger out later into the evening before returning home as well. Which was good in that she wouldn't have to deal with all three of them, but bad in that things might be taken out on her in his stead.

She knew none of these sorts of things about Kaltia--not who she had feuds with, or how she reacted to surprises, or anything. So Hemlata reluctantly decided Kaltia wouldn't be a good target, even if she was supposed to be visiting next week. She just didn't know enough about her.

Hemlata still tried to decipher Afra and Damia from their habits and personality tics, though. Damia was a bit easier. She would busy herself with things if she were annoyed, leaving minor decisions about the household to her husband until her anger had cooled. She'd gone off on Afra about something once early after Hemlata had come to live with them, and Hemlata had by chance come home early due to catching a local bug, and witnessed it, and they had spent the day avoiding one another, Damia due to some unfathomable reason, and Hemlata because she was frightened at the outburst.

Afra wasn't as easy to figure out, partly because while she thought he played with carving and origami and calligraphy when he was stressed, he also did it for fun, or out of habit, or for no particular reason at all (that she could see). He also tended to abruptly engage with a piece of string or a wad of paper any coonie that wandered into his vicinity when they were sitting and talking to one another, one-on-one, and seemed to only do it when she was around, although he clearly also paid attention to what she was saying while he did so, but she wasn't sure why he'd suddenly engage the coonies like that. She didn't think he knew he did it, though, and the coonies were always obliging with anyone who liked to play.

Afra and Damia were, if anything, much subtler than the men she'd grown up with. It unsettled her, because it was so hard to judge their moods, and that lack of knowledge frightened her. Sometimes she sat in the hallway, close enough to hear the tone of their voices talking, but not close enough to hear the words and technically be eavesdropping. But even hearing their voices quiet and regular didn't calm her, because half the time she was convinced they only ran their mouths to fool people, when the real conversation was silent between minds, something she couldn't hear any more. If they were ever really angry at her, would the words fail to reach their mouths at all, and would she miss the signs of anger because she was now deaf to thoughts?

Her musing on how she would complete her half of the bargain tangled up with her want--no, need--to keep the hat, tangled up with her memories of how she had plotted and watched and waited before running away, and tangled up with fear that she had no control over her mind, and that she was now deaf and would miss a crucial sign in her current caregivers behavior. She started to startle at small things--a loud burst of laughter, someone dropping hard-bound books on a ceramic floor by mistake, and she wrestled with the strong, horrifying urge in school to run up to the girls that whispered about her and tear their hair out for daring to speak about her like that.

Three quarters through the day, one of the teachers pulled her out of the hallway and sat her down on a couch in an office, and asked her if she was okay. And, like always, the fiercer need to keep strangers out of her business surfaced, and calmed the twisty, paranoid thoughts down. _I'm not acting normal,_ she thought. _This man sitting in front of me proves it. _And, just like that, she put a lid on things for yet another day, and smiled at him politely. "I'm okay. What did you want to talk to me about, sir?"

They couldn't exactly psych her if she was unwilling to admit anything was wrong, so they let her go, and two hours later, she was in the sled home again, with Afra driving this time, her hat firmly on her head to keep his thoughts away from hers. And she wondered if he would notice it, and if she could get away with acting like a much younger girl, the sort of girl who would be seized by a random, meaningless craze, like taking a liking to purple hats and wearing them everywhere. If he never touched it--and Afra wasn't exactly the sort to come into her personal space without permission, and she never gave permission--maybe she could get away with it. Just maybe.

---------

**Author's Notes:**

Apologies for the long wait! This fic is a little harder to write than _Sackcloth and Ashes_, and I want to do Hemlata justice. (Poor thing, she's all turned around in her head. And not without undue cause.) Next chapter--I introduce another character with an interesting past! (I may also re-upload chapters with minor corrections.)

EJ Amber--gah::hides:: Now I'm both pleased and horrified. Horrified that my fic was your introduction to this world (I'm not worthy!). And of course pleased that it stood up well enough that a newcomer to the Talent world still enjoys it. ::tries not to stare at all the flaws in her story:: Go to the library and check out the series by Anne McCaffrey--_The Rowan_ is the first book on the Tower and the Hive side (the Talent series is really split into two), and _To Ride Pegasus _is the first book on the Pegasus side. (Unfortunately the series is nearly out of print in the bookstores--only one book from the Tower and the Hive side is there, and you don't want to start with that one! But the library will definitely have it. Or you can likely get it used.)


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**

The ground beasts prowled around at the base of Anatoly's tree. He didn't know what they were actually called, and even if he had, he probably couldn't pronounce it, because the initial exploration party had been entirely Mrdini. Sometimes he thought he should make up a Basic name for them, but he wasn't very good at that sort of stuff. His own speech slurred when he spoke out loud to himself; there wasn't anyone to talk to, and the ground beasts were curious about the melodic sounds human speech made.

It had gotten his new foster parents killed.

So he didn't really name them, just called them ground beasts, silently in his head. Because that's what they were.

* * *

It was summer again, and hot. He remembered the heat from before, tropical, which the Mrdinis had quite liked. His foster parents and him, in comparison, had been miserable. What was the point of including a Human exploration team if the planet was going to end up Mrdini anyway, because of the climate?

That's what his foster mom, Vail, had said, the day they'd walked through Earth Tower, him gaping at the _size_ of the building while his new foster parents hurried him along, worried they would be late for their 'port to the Mrdini vessel orbiting the raw new planet they had been assigned to.

Sometimes he wished the Mrdini would just hurry up with the colonizing, because he hadn't seen anybody for years, Human, Mrdini, or otherwise. And he didn't know how long the years were here—sometimes he would freeze during his day, irrationally fearing that one year here was four years Standard, and he'd go home someday, hoping to be able to go to school and stuff and have a life and maybe see his crèche-mates again, but when he looked in the mirror he'd be an old man, and they wouldn't allow him into school because living wild had dumbed him down, and he was _old_.

And they wouldn't let him in the Towers then, either.

_Oh, stop thinking about it,_ he chided himself, feeling tears sting his eyes again. And he walked away from the hollow in the tree where he made his home, down a branch, and then levitated himself into another tree. All the other things that lived in trees were tiny, so it was the best way to travel, what with the ground beasts on the jungle floor.

The wooden stumps he'd placed to mark the place he'd buried his foster parents were rotted, again, despite the specimen preservative he'd sprayed all over them before sinking them into the ground. This was the third time this had happened. Anatoly stood skittishly on the forest floor as he gazed at them; there were no ground beasts currently about, but they were stealthy and fast, and he was standing before two buried memories of the violence they could do to a body.

Well. He had to replace the markers, which meant going back into the trees again, so with that rationalization he levitated up into the foliage again, and into safety.

* * *

Anatoly spent the day in the treetops, searching for a tree limb he could sever and fashion into crude markers again. It took a while; he'd learned the hard way that doing this to a live tree would summon up an immune response from the tree that would leave him itching for weeks, but dead trees were quickly consumed and broken down by various parasitic plants and fungi, and would rot very quickly even when coated in preservative if they weren't newly dead.

Mid-afternoon, he finally found what he sought; a tree with all of its fan-shaped leaves attached, but drooping with newly-occurred death. He levitated into it, landing lightly on a branch, and started to examine the branches for one he wanted.

The one he ultimately chose was as thick around has his thigh, with the main bulk of it the length of his leg, from trunk to tip. He telekinetically broke off the spindly end, and kept breaking it back until it was no longer tapering, and then _leaned_ on the branch where it met the trunk. It wasn't as easy as he had hoped, and it kept resisting...and resisting...and resisting...until...

CRACK!

The branch splintered off and began to fall while the tree swayed, its dead leaves flopping listlessly all around him. Anatoly "fumbled" it a bit, but managed to catch it before it hit the forest floor and lodged itself there.

And then the tree he was planting his feet on as he telekinetically manipulated the log collapsed out from under him.

* * *

Anatoly awoke screaming, which was the dumbest thing he could do while laying on the jungle floor, but he was pinned with a branch through his leg and _oh god oh god oh god_ it hurt. He'd been hurt before, but there was a difference between a broken toe and a branch the size of his arm embedded in his thigh, and the difference was that he _was already fucking dead and his fucking body just didn't know it yet._ He wished he was dead. Dead dead dead, so the pain would stop. _Stop._ Please, make it stop, make it stop, _please just let me die..._

* * *

Later, he awoke again. He wasn't dead, and he hated that. He was on the bank of a stream, and he feared that a ground beast had dragged his body there, and that if he looked around to where his lower half was still feeling as if it rested in a bed of embers, he'd see his own entrails pink and wet and entangled with the fronds of the pink, wet ferns that grew here along the bank. _Mmmm. Entrails._

He laughed and sobbed and still didn't dare look at his body behind him. Instead, he dug his fingers into the black, loamy mud and sipped at the water that seeped into the hole. He was still thirsty, and kept sobbing water out of his eyes as quickly as he could drink the grimy water out of the hole.

Eventually he passed out again.

* * *

The sun beat down on his body, baking it, making him long for water despite sitting in the middle of the warm, shallow stream. He drank some, sloppy with exhaustion, and wondered which animal this time had dragged him off of the bank and into the water proper.

The sun, the sun, the sun. It was hot, despite being only mid-morning. But that wasn't new to him. Anatoly knew he had to get out of the sun and into shelter before noon, but he was still in pain, and still feared to move or even look at his legs.

Something was _gnawing_ on him. Anatoly awoke with a shout, flipped over, and saw that he did have two legs still, but there was a ground beast there, its trunk wrapped around his calf as it chewed pensively on his toes, a rough, slimy tongue sliding down the bottom of his foot in some sort of freakish, hideous caress.

Anatoly_ pushed_. And dragged himself by proxy out of the creek and up the bank as the baffled ground beast went up the bank rump-first, still hanging onto him. It was a baby, he realized, only half the size of an adult. The babies were carrion-eaters. So, too, were the mothers for the duration of the offspring's infancy.

Swallowing back a sob that would likely bring the mother running, he _twisted_ the trunk of the youngster so that it would let go. It let go, but backed up in a playful manner he'd seen puppies and kittens do. A few sparse tears that he couldn't afford leaked down his face, and he felt weakness in the core of him. He wasn't strong enough to use his Talent like this, and the heat was making it hard to breathe, and he was in pain.

Still, he tried to divert the youngster with prods and twists and pushes, but they kept getting weaker, and he feared something that would really hurt it--such as blinding it--would make it produce a howl that would alert everything predatory around them for leagues. It played with him, worrying his toes in a way that jolted the worse wound in his thigh and making everything white out for moments in agony. His breath hissed in and out, no vocal sound being made, but the hiss was audible. He wished he would just _die_ now, so he would be dead before they ate him.

The sun burned him, as he jockeyed with the young predator. It thought he was _playing_ and pranced about, mocking him with displays of its back fringe. He cussed at it in his head, knowing he would end up in its belly. The sun still beat down. He wished he could throw this little fucker into the sun, have _it_ howl and shriek to death as the heat consumed it.

Hey. Maybe if he stared at the sun long enough, he could blind himself. At least then he wouldn't have to _watch_ himself being consumed. He lobbed a pebble at the creature, and it wandered away to snuffle for it in the pink ferns before coming back to lick his bleeding toes. He stared up at the sun, making spots dance across his vision, but like this slow death from wounds and from the predator, his vision was only partially obscured by the dots. He wanted something _final._

And then something final did come. The mother appeared, saw the youngster playing with him, and without further ado, chomped down on his other leg, and broke through the bone.

He screamed, in white-hot agony again, and, not wishing a final death after all, cursed it with a fiery ending, and _left_, visions of fire etching deeply into his mind. _Burn!_

Burn. Burnburnburnorangewhiteblueflameswirls. Nuclear-hot, nuclear-strong, radiation and heat and fire and burning.

_It's beautiful..._

* * *

The slap of cool tile against his fevered and burned skin forced a moan out of him. Then someone tripped over him, knocking him over, which sent a rolling piece of luggage skittering across the floor, people lurching out of its way until it banged into the blue-striped wall and came to a stop.

The man who had fallen over him was reacting with a wave of anger, and pain, and confusion in his mind, but none of it reached his mouth. Instead he reached out to _him_ and asked him if he were okay.

"'mm I dead?" he rasped, realizing there was another person in front of him. And people around him. All around him, their minds active and_alive_.

The man's ears caught the "am" and the "I", and filled out the rest incorrectly. "You're in Earth Tower," he said kindly. "But I think we need to find you a medic," and there was a flash from his mind of a dirty and torn and bleeding piece of meat, and a lot more panic at all the blood and torn flesh than the man's mouth let on.

_My legs. He's looking at my legs._

Confusion reined for a few moments; the only people who knew he had popped out of nowhere were the people around him, although they became alarmed and panicked, more thoughts of raw meat flashing through their minds' eye. But eventually the Talents picked it up, and suddenly the murmur of thoughts around him suddenly focused on him. Or rather, the idea of him, not him directly.

_There's a dirty, half-starved, and hurt young man near Gate Seventeen,_ someone said. It felt second-hand, as if the speaker hadn't seen him themself.

_Security's on its way._

_He's hurt, we need a medic!_ This one had _seen_ him, and was a lot less clinical. The flashes of raw-meat were stronger.

_Where did he come from?_

_Out of nowhere. He must have 'ported in._

_Wait, wait, wait, a strange, wounded young man teleported in from nowhere? Get Gren. Get him now. I'll eat both of my shoes if he's not an Emergent._

_I see him, my team and I. Poor kid, he's filthy, hurt, confused—and he can hear us!_

At that mental acknowledgement, he suddenly burst into bawling tears like a little boy, dry sobs that racked his body. They saw him! The Talents saw him! He really was back on Earth! He was _home_!

Suddenly the dynamos faltered and died down. _Oh you poor thing,_ a stronger mind, stronger than all the rest suddenly said. And the blue-eyed man he had glimpsed in awe all those years ago teleported into his presence, and started giving orders.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**

"The Mrdini claim it was a mistake he was left behind; they thought he'd perished with his parents," Jeff Raven told Gollee Gren.

"Anatoly's memories contradict that," Gollee said.

"If he hadn't had a strong kinetic push to him, I'm sure the fiction would have become fact, and we'd never have known. Ahhh! The joys of xenophobia," Jeff said sourly. "Speaking of kinetics--_is_ he still a telekinetic?"

"Elizara and her team are optimistic, although a bit mystified. After an unpowered jump like _that..._along with the physical wounds...he should be in worse condition. But he's soldiering on. Not a peep about any pain, except in unguarded, unshielded thoughts, and those are more an _awareness_ of pain, than any actual complaint. He feels that it would be whining to say anything."

"He's not--"

"Capellan? Nope, home-brewed. Orphaned, though, and raised in a crèche. Just naturally stoic, and optimistic, if you can have both, probably tempered by his upbringing." Gollee paused, deep in thought for a moment, or perhaps checking on the bo--young man. "He thinks the catalogues for cybernetic legs are the coolest things _ever_. If that isn't optimistic, I'm not sure what is. He's already chosen a casing cover, and is mulling over the actual model choices."

"Candy red? Oh no," and Jeff chuckled at the (literal) mental image Gollee flashed at him.

"Ah, I'm sure he'll switch it out before he's an adult. He'll have to replace it as he grows."

"Just the one?"

"Elizara says the other one will heal enough to walk on, if its partner is sturdy enough. He'll have a limp."

"That'll just make the girls interested in him."

"He cleans up well, with that dark tan and bleached blond hair. Once he gets a haircut. They've ignored it so far in favor of more important things, so it's shaggy at the moment."

"Are you _matchmaking_?" Jeff asked Gollee suddenly.

"Am I? God damn, you're right, I am. It's in the back of my mind." Gollee made a face, and shook his head as if to shake the thoughts out of it.

"Who are you thinking of?" Jeff asked with a laugh.

"My granddaughter. The middle one. She likes them blond and cute."

"There's Ewain, too," Jeff pondered, thinking of his grandson, who was also blond, and if the reactions by the younger female crowd were any judge, cute as well. Not as tan, though. Then he snorted. "Now you have _me_ doing it."

"Brainworm," Gollee said. "Thought that jumps from telepath to telepath."

"Now that's just scary," Jeff said. Then he yawned and stretched. "Enough of this. I can't believe you got me gossiping. Lunch is over, and I've still a slew of drones to throw and catch. Keep me informed on how Anatoly does, however."

"Will do. See you later, Jeff."

Earth Prime slid his chair around back to his desk, and waved goodbye over his shoulder, before getting back to work.

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**Author's Notes:** Sorry about the micro-update. I'm wrestling with Hemlata. Being an original character, she's _acting_ like an original character...or, in other words, isn't nearly as easy to write as any of AMC's canon characters. The next "chapter" is another cut scene; it's not funny like the other ones, but I'll explain why I'm showing it on the next page.


	11. Cut Scenes: Character Bastardization

**Author's Notes:**

Yep. It's a cut scene. It's not funny, like the other ones, but I'm posting it as an example of characterization gone wrong. If you want to do an exercise, read it through, and see if you can spot what's wrong. Then come back up here.

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Read it? Yeah. It looks like Afra, smells like Afra, and has the poor man's memories, but _it's not Afra_. It is, in fact, something or someone more like Jeff, wearing Afra's skin, and rummaging through his memories for similes like those thoughts are a dollar garage sale and Afra can't shield worth a damn.

Le sigh.

And then, to make matters worse...that stuff at the end...Damia wasn't a mean kid. That was pointed out quite clearly in _Damia_. Her empathy for animals was pointed out too. So that comparison falls flat and wrong. It's not canon characterization, it's bending Damia so that she fits into the role of being compared to Hemlata. But it doesn't work; Hemlata is not as nice of a person as Damia. And I feel ashamed at attempting to bastardize Damia in that way. (I'm just glad I caught it!)

So, this is why you only actually get a micro-update today. I wrote the below, but it _sucks_. So I'm using it as teaching fodder. For myself, at least. Maybe it will be of use to others. It helps me at least to write out this stuff I see wrong with the structure of that scene below!

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"Sometimes this is like watching an old sled with a worn pad listing to the side," Afra mused, as he perched on a stool in the kitchen, staring out the window.

"What is?" Damia asked, going over bills at the com on the counter, her head propped up in her hand.

"Hemlata," Afra said. "She started out well enough, but there's something in the way she's handling that is slightly...off."

"Like an old sled with a worn pad and a shoddy steering harness?" Damia said, understanding his metaphor better the longer she thought about it. "Still getting from point A to point B, but driving along in a queer fashion." She nodded thoughtfully.

"Something like that. I think old habits are rearing their heads, and reinforcing erroneous conclusions about her situation."

"How so?"

"Well...I remember when I was a lad," and he smiled at his own word choice. Damia rolled her eyes. "I had a lot of pressure to be the best of the best. In school at least; oddly enough, my parents underestimated my strength of Talent, and overestimated my academic skills. Anyway, my point is that even once I'd taken up my position with your mother at Callisto, for a while I compared any statistics I could find about my productivity against those of all the other Towers. Not too difficult; it was part of Brian's and my duties to generate reports and present our findings to the Rowan."

"So you were competitive?" Damia asked in surprise.

"Virulently, although I hid it."

"No running around and shouting and doing little victory dances when you broke some personal goal?"

Afra chuckled. "No, I'm afraid not. Ewain got that from _you_. But it hung in my mind, for a good six to eight months of my first year. I thought about it a lot, wanting to be so good at what I did that my family would be impressed, even though I pretty much went behind their backs to get the job." Afra chuckled again, ruefully this time. "And because it hung in my mind so much, this little leftover ghost of my upbringing, off-the-cuff comments and thoughts from your mother would hit me much harder than she ever intended or meant--although I didn't let her know that. But when I looked back on it, after the bruises to my ego had faded, I saw that they really weren't as pointed as I had thought they'd been. That's what made me realize I was applying...modes of thinking where they, perhaps, shouldn't be applied.

"I broke out of it shortly after that, which was a good thing because at right about that time your mother and Reidinger IV felt I had passed whatever tests they had had in mind, and gave me additional duties. Before then, I'd been running at half-load most of the time, compared to what I'd be doing later on."

"So they _were_ testing you?"

"The tests I was afraid I wasn't good enough at weren't the things they were looking for. Second-in-command is more of a leadership role than a numbers game. My parents were trying to lead me towards a Stationmaster role--which _is_ more of a numbers game, a lot of logistics, and I was unconsciously striving, I think, to do well in skills _that_ position required, rather than in the skills my own position required. It was like I was trying to score as many goals on a soccer field as I could, when the real test was how many laps I could run around the track."

"So mom and Earth-Prime-before-Dad were putting you through your paces," Damia said with a grin.

"Exactly. Luckily my legs are long so the laps weren't too much of a difficulty, even though my attention was elsewhere and I hadn't a clue they were being counted," Afra said.

Damia snorted.

"My point here is that I think Hemlata is doing the same thing. She sees us doing something, and mis-interprets our motives, because her mode of thinking was formed in an entirely different environment. If she catches us speaking telepathically, we're of course talking about her, because it's the equivalent of whispering."

_We always float in and out of verbal speech,_ Damia pointed out. _In the privacy of our own home, at least._

"_We_ know that, but she doesn't, and no longer has any means to find out who we're talking about. She can't hear us. She doesn't even have the _choice_ to be rude, boorish, and shocking by breaking into a private conversation. The question is, how do we break her of these incorrect assumptions and modes of thinking without reinforcing her suspicions?"

"The counseling sessions aren't helping?"

"As the old adage goes--if you don't want help..."

"I see. Going through four different councilors probably didn't help either."

"Not really."

"But I think they were doing more damage than good--that's why I pulled her out of those sessions."

"I agree."

"We might have to force her to broaden her horizons, and do damage-control when we inevitably trigger something."

Afra frowned. _Teenagers don't take well to that in the best of situations. Even our own lot. Take Morag, for example._

_That is true, but perhaps some years down the line the puzzle will click together and something we forced her through will have an effect on her._

_I'm not sure that's wise,_ Afra warned.

_You ended up liking more Capellan things than you had expected,_ Damia pointed out. _Things you were originally forced into against your original inclination._

_Hemlata's not really like me. She's more like you._

"Me?" Damia asked out loud in surprise. "She's so quiet."

_Loud, quiet -- not really the issue. She _was_ raised Capellan; certain aspects of her core personality are modulated by that. She's passionate, and stubborn, and if she sets her feet in, she's not going to move!_

_What lovely terms to describe me in! And _you're_ passionate, and stubborn. When you want to be._

Afra smiled and gave her cheek a light telekinetic caress. "If you and Hemlata had met each other as three year olds, you would be the one to shove her over in a direct confrontation. Hemlata would grab the rug under you and give it a huge tug. But the final result would be the same; you both would be flat on your diapers on the floor."

Damia started to laugh. "I wasn't a _mean_ kid! Was I?"

"Three year olds are tyrants. You certainly know that, my dear. We had eight of them." He shot her a memory of toddler-age Morag getting into a fight with Rojer, all the more amusing because Morag had won, with Rojer twice her age at the time.

"I_never_ shoved anybody!"

"Alright, perhaps not," Afra conceded. _If only because there was nobody your age to shove,_ he thought to himself, privately behind shields. "But if you had--"


	12. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven**

"We need to find another psychiatrist?" Afra asked in surprise as he tapped through the day's messages on their com in the kitchen, while an un-shelled bowl of beans sat forgotten by his elbow.

One of the 'Dinis, Afra didn't catch which one, made a click of disapproval. Afra mildly looked over his shoulder at them, but neither met his eye, presumably too occupied with skinning carrots and potatoes, which they held at eye-level. He turned back to his com without remark; there had been a bit of friction between the Human and Mrdini adults over the raising of Hemlata these past few months. The Mrdini did not seem to grasp that Hemlata was different than their other children; they saw her polite, shy exterior and came to different conclusions than Afra and Damia, who could sense her thoughts and emotions--and xenophobia. They wanted to help raise the "orphan", and were a bit hurt at being excluded, despite Afra and Damia's efforts to soothe ruffled fur.

"Yes, I dismissed her this morning," Damia said. _Sorry I forgot to tell you, but then David had that urgent drone to send to us, and..._

Afra sent a calming touch to her; he knew as well as she did the hectic day they'd had. _What went wrong with this one?_

Damia sent a wordless burst of frustration._ I don't know. We've tried Talented psychiatrists, we've tried un-Talented. We've tried Telepths, Empaths, and Healing Talents. None of them are right for her, but it's different for each one. The Telepath was not empathic enough; he caught the wayward thoughts, but not the pain and hurt that prompted them, and over-reacted. The Empath was frightened of her. The non-Talent couldn't make it past her shy, polite exterior. This one? I just _knew_ she was doing more harm than good. I can't put my finger on it, but I _knew_. And Hemlata does _not_ need to be harmed more than she's already _been_ harmed!_ A pot of noodles clanked with less than her usual grace onto the cooktop.

_We need to keep her in counseling, otherwise she will be taken from us._

_I _know_ that, Af'a, I know. Pain in the arse, that they could use something as stupid as that as a reason to take her away from us. We've raised _eight_ Human children, and had a hand in raising _sixteen_ Mrdini!_

That caused Afra to chuckle, suddenly. If you looked at it that way, they'd raised more Mrdini than Humans.

Damia caught the thought he was laughing at after a long, probing stare, then snorted. "Are you going to shell those?"

"Mmm? Oh, yes. Apologies." Afra recovered the bowl from his elbow and sat it in his lap, while telekinetically continuing to scroll through their com messages.

WHAT IS AMUSING? Trp asked him curiously.

Afra hesitated, unwilling to open up the subject of letting Trp and Flkm do more to raise Hemlata again, and his thought about having almost raised more Mrdini than Humans might start it up, regardless if he wanted to talk about it or not.

Damia saved him, however, with a joke slightly off-color enough that the Mrdinis might not understand it fully, but would understand why he would hesitate to relay it to them.

He projected his amusement at her 'save'. _Because telepathically telling each other dirty jokes is what we Talents always do._

_Now that the children are out of the house, it might be an interesting pastime, _his wife said mischievously.

_You don't think eight...er, nine...are enough?_ Afra pretended to be astonished, and projected little wiggles of astonishment at her.

_If dirty jokes make you think of _that_...I think you might have some secret quirks you've not told me about yet..._

Afra tried to think of a good comeback to that, and couldn't, so he returned to shelling his beans, projecting serenity as exaggeratedly as the astonishment from moments before.

Damia struggled not to giggle.

MUSE BE A VERY FUNNY JOKE, Flkm confided to Trp. BUT I DO NOT SEE WHY. Still, it must have found something funny because it made the equivalent Mrdini sound of laughter.

Afra and Damia's eyes met over the countertop, and Afra kept shelling his beans so straight-faced that it set his wife off again. He smiled to himself in victory.

* * *

Hemlata sat in the hallway, her hat on her head, and her back to the wall, and stared expressionlessly at a pot on a small table, trying not to cry. Trying not to grab the pot off of the table and dash it against the floor, too. It looked so _aggressively_ Capellan she felt as if it was almost mocking her along with the rising and falling sounds of Damia's laughter.

They'd been talking about her before Damia started to laugh. About dismissing the psychiatrist. And then they went silent, before one of those aliens spoke in its strange, clicking language. There was no way for her to know what had been said, in the space between minds, or in the _other_ sounds of the Mrdini tongue.

Hemlata briefly wondered if Mrdini had tongues, and if not, was it still proper to call their language a "tongue"? And then she had a brief, thrilling, daring thought to go down there and _ask_ one, right to its face. Because they understood her Basic, even if she could barely make out their words underneath the thick accents. They would understand her question.

Then she blushed red. It would be so rude. And Afra and Damia already hated her for driving off another psychiatrist. Already laughed at her for that.

Not to mention the hat. Because surely they had noticed it. It was putting her on edge, waiting for one of them to say something about it. Waiting for the other shoe to drop, for the guillotine to fall. And she hated herself for it, because she _knew_ they would never punish her in any real way, but she still feared the punishment.

There was a sudden squeal from below, the laughing kind ditzy girls made. Of course, the only one down there who was female was Damia, so it couldn't have been a girl. But the sound infuriated her regardless. It sounded so _stupid._ It was a carefree, happy squeal. She wondered if Afra had thrown something at her. Boys did that, although she couldn't really imagine Afra chucking anything at anyone. _Maybe_ a ball, in a game of catch.

She wondered if Afra ever horsed around with Damia, and then tried not to think about that, because she didn't like where such thoughts were leading. She stared at the pot again, but still wanted to break it, so she looked elsewhere. At the floor. She poked at the carpeting with a finger, trying not to cry again.

A Mrdini found her there, some time later, making her jump, and stare up at the large poll eye, feeling guilty, although it wasn't like she wasn't _supposed_ to sit here.

"Little one should not 'vesdrop," it told her, its alien voice lacking human inflections, and filled with alien ones she could not understand.

She felt a sudden, burning anger at it.

It reached down and touched her shoulder. "Come, join fam'ly. Then, you will not 'vesdropping."

_They're_ not_ my family,_ she thought, not moving an inch. _I don't_ HAVE_ a family. They laugh at me, and so do YOU!_ Her face was blank, however, despite the pain she felt spearing through her heart. She did pull away from its front flippers, though.

It reached for her again, and this time its grip on her was firm, commanding despite only gripping the one shoulder.

She snapped.

The alien's fur was strangely silky-soft under her fingers as she lunged for it, and it lurched back, flippers flailing in undecided movements as it didn't seem to know if it should protect itself or not. A fluid stream of clicks and consonants flowed from its mouth, alien words with a strangled, badly-pronounced and mangled Basic word in there here and there, chilling her. She didn't know what it was saying, didn't know what it was saying about _her_, and it terrified her. "Shut up," she hissed. "Shut up, _shut up_, SHUT UP!" and her voice rose in a hysterical shriek as she pressed her palm against its mouth-hole.

Suddenly movement; two Humans there, and the pounding of flippers up the stairs as the other Mrdini ran in their direction. Hemlata was seized around her ribcage with a mind, and then an arm, while Damia knelt by the distraught 'Dini. Hemlata screamed her rage, her fury, and her pain, writhing in Afra's grip--for it was Afra who was pulling her back and away. "LET ME GO! LET ME GO, YOU BASTARD!"

"Lean on her," Damia snapped.

"I don't think that's necessary," Afra said. "And she's wearing a skullcap. Hemlata, what happened? Calm down--" Despite his calm voice, his arm was still like a vise around her chest. Hemlata writhed, craning to glare up at him, and then back at Damia.

Damia's expression was as loud as any telepathic thought--it was obvious she thought it was very necessary to _lean_ on Hemlata.

Hemlata bared her teeth in a snarl. "NO!" she yelled at the woman, fury overwhelming the shrillness in her voice so that the word was something more bestial. It was strange to feel that sound coming from within her own chest.

Damia did _not_ like being spoken to like that. She surged to her feet, leaving the one Mrdini to the care of the other, which had arrived, and reached out to snatch the hat right off of Hemlata's head.

_She's going into my head, she's going into my head!_ Hemlata's thoughts babbled to herself in terror, as she clamped down on the hat with her two hands. Afra was still holding onto her, so she couldn't run. She screamed, terror and fear in that high, piercing note, and pistoned her leg back to kick Afra as hard as she could so he would let go so she could _runrunrun _from this woman who was going to crack open her mind like a nut. Afra sucked in a hissing breath between his teeth, but his grip loosened only slightly, and Damia successfully wrenched the lovely purple hat off of her head.

_NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!_ she shrieked, the sound bouncing off of the walls, and in her head, and causing her brain to feel a deep revving up as if some mechanical monster was awakening. The taste of lime and acid filled her mouth.

Both Talents staggered, and Afra's weight suddenly came down on her shoulders heavily for a second, then suddenly somebody put the cap back on her.

At the same moment, she ran, because Afra had mostly let go of her and it was easy to slip out of his hands.

She bolted down the hallway, and careened into a doorway heavily as she cornered badly. She ignored the pain, and vaulted down the stairs from landing to landing, her knees and ankles jarring with each jump, and headed towards the kitchen door that led outside at full speed, hoping she wasn't moving too fast for its sensor to pick up.

Her hope was dashed; it didn't move out of her way, and she was going too quickly to stop, and bounced off of it roughly with a vibrating _thunk_, tumbling to the floor. A coonie cat that had been on the outside staring in bolted in terror up a tree.

Hemlata struggled to her feet, and danced before the door, trying to trigger its sensor, but it didn't budge. So she turned and ran to a window, trying to open it. She couldn't open it, even though it was unlocked.

Sobbing hysterically, she ran through the ground level of the house, trying every door, and windows at random. None moved. She fled down to the pool level, trying the lower level door that led out to the stables. It didn't move either, and she paused in front of it, with the pool behind her, tears flowing freely down her face. Then there was a sound behind her, and she jumped and whirled around, and watched in confusion as a pool cover appeared and fastened itself over the pool. In between her terror, and urge to _get away_, she wondered why they were covering the pool right now. It wasn't like she could swim away...could she?

She crept to the edge of the pool, as if stealth would even help, and tugged at the edge of the covering. It would not move; it wasn't lashed down yet, but whoever's telekinetic shove held it down was doing so firmly.

They wouldn't let her leave; she was trapped here, and they wanted to get into her mind. "I just want to be left alone!" she bawled. "Please, why doesn't anyone leave me alone?"

* * *

Afra paused at the top of the stairs, unseen, as he listened to the plea that drifted up. His head ached and his nerves were still jangling from the sheer undiluted _terror_ that had blasted out when Damia had removed her skullcap. But between her fear from before, and the plea from below, he felt a pang of sadness for her, regardless of the bruises and ache in his groin that she had inflicted on him.

Damia was much more skeptical, but it was driven by her own fear--not a fear of Hemlata, but a fear for what may have happened to Flkm had they not been in the house when this had happened, and anger on his behalf.

_It's not like I need them anymore, dear one, didn't we agree eight was enough?_ He said soothingly, and with a bit of amusement while sliding into a chair that had a line of sight to the downstairs stairwell. _Ouch,_ he thought privately to himself behind tight shields. She'd gotten him pretty good.

_They're mine!_ Damia said, her sheer seriousness and anger blinding her to the amusing aspects of that statement, considering what part of his anatomy she was claiming as hers.

He projected another wordless soothing sensation at her, but she shredded it to bits. _She attacked Flkm! She attacked you!_

_What does Flkm say happened?_

_I don't know; they're going too fast for me when I ask. I wish one of ours was here!_

_I don't,_ Afra said. He was fairly certain adding more people to the mix would have made this disaster ten times worse. Their bi-lingual abilities wouldn't have changed that. _And Hemlata is 'ours'._

Damia's reception to that proclamation was chilly.

_And I grabbed her from behind; not the brightest thing I've ever done,_ Afra said. _She was obviously hysterical with fear, even before you took the skullcap off._

_Why did you put it back on?_ Damia said, resenting it. _I could have taken her down._

Afra snorted to himself, softly. _You shouldn't have tried taking it off, love. Aside from the fact that those little implants aren't quite the Prime-droppers we thought they were judging from my headache, I think we might have seriously emotionally damaged her if we had kept it off and put her under by force. I think we may have already._

_She was already damaged, Afra. I don't think we changed that._

Afra shook his head. _If I hadn't been so heavy-handed the day I brought her home..._

_Don't you dare blame yourself for this!_

_I'm not. But that terror! She's deathly afraid of losing control of her thoughts. And she knows either one of us could peek in her deepest, darkest mind whenever we want to. Whether we _would_ is immaterial; she can't take that chance and still feel safe._ Afra sighed, feeling age and sadness pull his features into an unusual frown. _Has anyone checked in on us?_ he asked suddenly.

_No,_ Damia said. _Not Dad or Mom or even one of our children._

_That's strange,_ Afra said. Typically for a snafu of this sort they would have a dozen different minds inquiring what had happened. Perhaps the dampers in her head hadn't completely failed there for a moment; perhaps the psychically enhanced projection of fear had only been short range.

_Are you going to go down there?_ Damia said.

_No; she said, wailed, that she just wanted to be left alone. She's still down there, and isn't going from window to window like a trapped hummingbird anymore. I'm going to let her calm down._ And let his headache hopefully fade to a more bearable level.

They were quiet for a while. Then Damia said, _Flkm says it confronted her about eavesdropping, but suggested right away that she join us downstairs so it would no longer be considered eavesdropping. It doesn't know what triggered her outburst._

_She's a bit xenophobic, its mere presence may have set her off._

_It apologized for touching her; he knows that Talents don't like to be touched._ Damia was irritated. _It doesn't need to apologize. I just told it that. It did nothing wrong._

_I agree_, Afra said.

_We need to take her to Blundell,_ Damia said.

_...I agree, _Afra said slowly, carefully. _We need to take the dampers out and teach her how to use her Talent. The medics at Blundell can do that._

_WHAT?!_

_At least enough so that she can form a shield. If she knows she has a shield she can control, the issue of people invading the privacy of her mind will be solved._

_And how the hell will we do that? She'll be a fully functional Talent if we take those out for 'training', and _this_ is proof that anything could go wrong!_

_We do it carefully. And once she's had this training, and the dampers re-implanted, we bring her back home._

Damia was speechless.

_Or at least, those are my thoughts, coonie. Let's give ourselves twenty-four, forty-eight hours to get out of this emotional mess and calm down, and decide then._

_Hmph,_ Damia said. _Good luck with that._

* * *

**Author's Notes:**

Now, this is a more reasonable update, I think! :) I tried to do small caps for the Mrdini words; didn't take when I uploaded this here. So they're regular caps. Sorry! Also, unsure if I've captured the Mrdinis properly...I've never liked how they were portrayed in the books, and I don't really want to use them in this fic, but it sort of fit in naturally here. So yeah.

It's kind of scary when you contemplate the sheer SIZE of the Raven-Lyon household. 4 adults--two Human, two Mrdini. Eight human children, each with one pair of Mrdini. That's TWENTY-EIGHT people when everyone is home, with the Humans being outnumbered. Holy extended family, Batman! And that's the _nuclear_ family; I'm scared to think of what the actual extended family get-together would be like! Their home must be like a...compound. Fortress. Gi-GAN-tic mansion...

...must rattle around pretty empty too, now that all 8 children and their Mrdinis are gone away. Yeah, I see Afra getting empty-nest syndrome pretty bad.

Re: the cut scene from before...I absolutely agree that Damia, if pushed emotionally to her limit at the age of three (example, when her brother and sister ignored her and she started telekinetically throwing things at them), will throw things, hit, shove, and generally throw a huge fit. She has a temper, and when pushed it will flare up. However, I don't ever see her just shoving another toddler when in any other mood, even a toddler she disliked. She's naturally empathic when her own rage doesn't over-ride it. It's not really a nature vs. nurture thing, as her personality would not be reacting with ethics quite yet; for example, I remember when I was 5, I had a friend who was 3, and this friend had a mean streak; she would hit me, and I remember quite vividly that her eyes would calculate my reaction. She retained this streak into childhood, of pushing others around to get what she wanted. Whereas I never retaliated; not because I thought it was wrong to hit back, but because I'm rather submissive and I fear the retaliation of others instinctively. It's a base personality characteristic I've had all my life, which colors all my reactions to people. It is, of course, tempered by the personality and ethics and morals I obtained as I grew up, mainly, I got sick of being pushed around so I learned to be more pushy so that I occasionally can get things that I want, and so that people don't always use me, but my base temperament makes me want to please others so they aren't mad at me more than to get my own way, and it's an uphill battle to act any other way.

So. Amateur human psychology 101!

P. S. I am TICKED that fanfiction dot net is not allowing my hyphen-dividers anymore. What must I do to indicate a new scene? I can't use the star, I can't use the hyphen...phooey!


	13. Chapter 12

**Chapter Twelve**

"What _is_ that?" Anatoly asked the man who had carted him out of the hospital today, with the blessing of the medics, as they walked outside. The man had said his name was Gollee Gren, and he wore a small external headset curled around one ear--unusual in a day where most businessmen who needed to be on call 24/7 had the necessary hardware implanted directly into their jaw and cochlea.

"You put your head in it," Gollee said, gesturing around his own head with a hand, as if that would explain things. He didn't elaborate telepathically, although Anatoly knew the man was a Talent.

Anatoly eyed the machine that sat before them. It had a seat perched upon a silver pedestal that probably raised or lowered as necessary. That part looked ok...like a dentist's chair, but whatever. The strange part was the...tank...or something...that hung suspended slightly above where you would put your head. It had a hose protruding from it, which vanished into the ceiling, and a roundish hole in the bottom, where you would stick your head. "Why would I want to put my head in that?" he asked suspiciously.

Gollee glanced at him over his shoulder. "You've never had a haircut before, kid?"

"Where I come from, we use scissors for that, not a brain-sucking contraption from _hell_."

The other man blinked, then threw back his head and laughed. "It's the tube, isn't it!"

"Well, that and the fact that it's gigantic like some ancient machine from a hundred or two years ago. And I think I see head-restraints. And yeah, why _does_ it have a tube?"

"There have been...accidents...with the incinerator type. So it sucks away the hair first, and _then_ incinerates it."

"...and you want me to stick my _head_ in that?"

"Well, it's not the _old_ ones. They took those out of production. So you're in no danger of having your head set on fire."

"Oh, great," Anatoly said, sarcasm lacing his tone. "What's wrong with an old-fashioned pair of scissors?"

Gollee shrugged. "Nothing, nothing. I'm sure we could find a barber that's not completely booked, and reschedule some stuff I had planned for today for later. They'll have a bit of a wait time, but we can work with it. I just figured this would be faster--" _ Didn't think he was the primping type..._a faint, echoed thought trailed the spoken words, as he shrugged.

_I'm not the primping type,_ Anatoly pointed out. _But I am cautious._

Gollee raised his eyebrows. "We need to get you into classes," he said, "if you are able to pick up things like that so easily."

Anatoly blushed. "I wasn't probing...or at least I don't think I was."

"Could be I'm just getting shoddy with my shielding in my own age," Gollee said with a snort. "Don't take the thought the wrong way. If you want to primp...that's _fine_ by me."

This time, Anatoly heard a teasing note in the man's mental voice, and knew he didn't really believe Anatoly was fussy, he was giving him a jibe for having picked up the original thought in the first place. Nonetheless, he realized Gollee was a bit unpleased that whatever schedule he had put together for today would end up in disarray if they took the time to go to a real barber, so Anatoly shrugged, sighed, and climbed up onto the chair.

"Good boy," Gollee told him humorously. "We'll get you looking fit to meet Earth Prime in no time."

"I'm meeting Earth Prime?" Anatoly asked in surprise.

Under him, the machine came to life, raising him off of the ground until his head was entirely enclosed within the tank. A screen before his eyes was waiting for him, and once the machine decided he was place properly for whatever hair-cutting process was going to ensue, it gave him instructions in a dulcet, androgynous voice on how to pick a haircut, hair color, and hairstyle. Feeling a tad claustrophobic, Anatoly looked through the virtual catalogue, his eye movements prompting the 'page' to turn when he was ready. Things seemed mostly limited to short hairstyles, but the array of hair-colorings were truly astounding, and he hesitated before a rich, shiny, chrome-red that would almost match the casing on his new cybernetic leg.

_In addition to meeting with Earth Prime today, please keep in mind that your fellow classmates will also see you with your new hairstyle, and that that particular hair color pretty much screams for your teacher to call on you for pretty much _every_ question. Not to mention puts you up for a lot of nicknames you might not be able to shake later on. If you want to go for red, you might want to pick a more natural shade. At least until you settle in._

_...does it really come out that chromium-red?_

_Oh yes!_ And there was an under-currant of knowledge to that thought. Obviously, someone Gollee knew had tried it, and the results were spectacular.

Anatoly grinned at the screen. Gollee was right--perhaps that wasn't the best color for _today_, but surely he'd be able to try it sometime in the future...

For now, he chose a short, plain cut, and left his hair blond. And then he gave the machine the go-ahead to begin.

Eye-protection slid down to cover his eyes, and head restraints to keep his head from moving and interfering with the process, and he felt himself curl his fingers around the arm-rests, anxiously. Even with the eye protection in place, he saw an orangeish glow. Then something buzzed around his ears, and his head was lighter by a good portion of hair, which felt odd. Then the vacuum kicked in and scared the unholy fuck out of him even as it whooshed away hanks of newly liberated hair. So _that_ was what the head restraints were for...

Although Anatoly usually sort of liked haircuts, this one was more to be put up with than enjoyed, so he tried not to puncture the vinyal armrests with his fingers, and sat and endured the machine as it burned his hair away in an aesthetically pleasing style, the vacuum kicking in noisily every so often to whisk the scraps away.

_You look like you're about to climb the walls,_ Gollee commented, as the process wore on. _I'm sort of glad I've never tried one of these myself..._

Anatoly tried not to think it, because he knew his knowledge of forming a solid shield was as spotty as the shield itself, but it wormed its way through his mind. _You're a sadistic bastard..._

He felt Gollee's answering grin.

A while later, he could also feel that the machine was winding down; puffs of air were moving his hair around, but the buzz of the laser cutting it got more and more sporadic, and the buzzes were shorter. It was the mechanical equivalent of a hair stylist surveying their work by occasionally sticking their hand in to push it around, then doing a few small snips, before mussing it around again and giving it a critical eyeball.

This fact was probably the only reason he didn't lose an ear. An _enraged? Fearful? Hysterical?_ scream slammed through his weak shields like a fist through a bowl of pudding, and not even the restraints could stop him from jerking to the side in reaction, as if trying to dodge a bullet that had already hit him. He smelt the sizzle of burned hair, heard Gollee spit out a few choice cusswords--although they oddly didn't echo in his mind--and a moment later he was sprawled on his ass on the ground at Gollee's feet, and the man was reaching down to grasp Anatoly's jaw so he could survey the damage and see if any medical attention was needed.

Anatoly didn't care about his hair, and didn't feel any pain, so he pushed Gollee away. _What--what was that?_ He demanded._ Is she hurt? We have to help her!_

_She's ok,_ Gollee said gruffly, a sense of embarrassment coloring his words.

_We just heard a woman scream, and you say she's ok?_ Anatoly asked in astonishment. _Is it possible to _fake_ emotions like that?_

Gollee stopped focusing on the side of Anatoly's head, and looked him in the eye. His shields were much firmer now, a true shielding, and nothing leaked out from behind them. _She's...being taken care of by people who care for her. She's not ok in a broad sense, thus the...intense emotions...but in an immediate sense, she's not in the middle of having her throat slit, or anything like that despite what we just felt._ There was some sadness tingeing his tone. _You might end up meeting her, eventually. But,_ and his tone became official, _please do not share this information, or your experience of what just happened, with others. Those are orders given to me, and to you too, from Earth Prime._

Anatoly stared at him.

_You will obey those orders, won't you?_

Anatoly shook his head. "I didn't mean to imply that I wouldn't--"

_Telepathically, please. We're in a public area, and this is a private conversation._

_--I'm just...worried about her._

_So are we. Don't fret, Anatoly. Like I said, she has people who care for her, and I can't think of any people better to look out for her welfare._ And he sighed. _I _am_ sorry about your hair._ And the tone was so mournful that Anatoly found himself touching the side of his head. It had...it had a pretty spectacular bald pattern.

"Well...it will grow back," Anatoly offered, optimistically. _Wait, can I speak out loud now?_

_Your hair isn't a classified FT&T subject,_ Gollee said with an accompanying audible snort_...and won't become one if we go see a barber before your meeting with Earth Prime._ He glanced as his watch. _I think this qualifies as a hair emergency; we'll probably be able to jump any waiting list. Someone will give up their place. Other than that, I'll just make like a G-man and get pushy if they don't. I'm really very sorry, Anatoly--if we'd done as you'd preferred, this wouldn't have happened._

Anatoly shrugged and forgave him. "How would you know I'd jump out of my skin like that?" he asked, lightly. "Do you have any barbers that you recommend?"

"One or two," Gollee said, and gently gave Anatoly a boost as the young man climbed to his feet. "Come on; we want to catch them before they take their lunch. It may take some time for them to fix this mess that's been made."

* * *

Given the shortness of his blond hair, since the machine had almost been done, there hadn't been much the barber could do for him, particularly since there was nothing in the world that could convince Anatoly to wear a wig. Therefore, a couple of hours later, Anatoly met Earth Prime with his head shaved as hairless as an egg. Of course, his scalp was several shades lighter than the rest of his deeply tanned skin, so they'd also found a bottle of fake tan to cover that up. Although, Anatoly suspected that Earth Prime wasn't fooled by anything--in fact, he suspected that the man had been listening in the entire time. Particularly after he found out Gollee was the man's second-in-command, and that the two were as tight as two strips of velcro. Which just reinforced Anatoly's earlier impression of the G-man; he was a hilariously sadistic bastard.

"Anatoly, welcome, take a seat. Go away, Gren," Jeff Raven, Earth Prime, commanded his second-in-command with a humor that negated the rudeness of his words.

"Yes sir," Gollee said, with exaggerated solemnly. Then he winked at Anatoly. "Have fun. But not too much fun, or else he'll find some work for you."

Yeah, the two were as tight as velcro.

When Gollee Gren was gone, Jeff Raven regarded Anatoly with bright, curious eyes. "You are certainly looking better now than the first time I saw you," he commented. "How's your new leg working out for you?" he asked, nodding at it where Anatoly had it stretched out in front of him. The programming had been completed enough to walk, but the leg was still learning how to interpret some of his nerve impulses, and at this particular moment it was having trouble with bending at the knee while he sat. It seemed to think he was lying down, instead.

"Well, the medics and I are still programming it, sir, but I'm just glad I can walk. And that, you know, technology is advanced enough that I don't have to wear a foot-shaped peg leg."

Jeff chuckled. "And how's the other one?"

"They say it's healed up better than expected, sir, given that my genetic code isn't as compatible with current re-growth techniques as they'd like." Which was why he'd opted for a cybernetic leg, instead of trying to grow a new one from the stump of where they had to amputate. "I kind of limp, but not as badly as they thought I would."

"That is excellent news," Earth Prime said warmly. Anatoly suspected it wasn't entirely _new_ news to this man, but appreciated the sentiment. "Gollee tells me that you're itching to get out of that hospital wing, and that you've got a fine-tuned telepathic ear, and a keen sense of when a telekinetic jump is in order."

Heh, so Earth Prime did know something about the hair-cut incident. He'd jumped out of that damn machine all right.

"He also says your shields are like Swiss cheese."

Anatoly flushed bright red.

"But! We can clear that up with a bit of training, and hone your telepathy and telekinesis as well. That jump you made from the planet you were stranded on all the way back here to Earth was quite an impressive jump, so you've obviously got a reach to you--but if you ever try anything like that un-powered again I will perform the closest legal equivalent of putting you over my knee and whacking you one, because un-powered psychic actions over such extreme distances isn't something most Talents can do even _once_ without burning themselves severely. You're a lucky young man that you came away from that with your Talent un-diminished. _Don't_ tempt luck again."

"Yes sir," Anatoly said. Considering he didn't intend to get stranded on a strange, wild alien planet again, he doubted he ever would do anything without a power source.

_That wasn't a criticism of what you did, mind you,_ Jeff Raven said in his mind. _In your particular situation, I would have done the same. Take it as a warning for the future, instead._

_Yes sir,_ Anatoly said again.

"I'm going to throw you back with Gollee for a while, so you can irritate one another. He is going to put you through your paces and run you through our usual battery of tests. Barring unusual circumstances, you should be assigned a preliminary T-rating within the next two weeks, and we will put you into classes at the same time. You'll be working with a tutor on the basic subjects until you are proficient again with what you knew before your extended time away from schooling, but as for training of your Talent, you will be put into classes with other Talents as soon as we know where to put you. Does this sound suitable?"

"Even if it didn't, would I have a choice?" Anatoly asked, amused.

Earth Prime looked surprised. "Of course you would. You're legally an adult, but still young enough to fall under many of the laws providing for orphans--you don't have to shelter under the FT&T wing if you don't want to, there are other options. Although possibly not as all-encompassing. In any event, I would advise you to stay around long enough to learn how to control your Talent; certain laws apply to all Talents, and if you decide to part company with us, I'd rather not have you meet the FT&T again because of a law broken in ignorance. You're a strong enough Talent that you would be given little leeway if you end up facing the law in court."

Anatoly blinked. "The FT&T does policework?"

"Only for Talent-related crimes. We also carry out the punishment too, if necessary." Earth Prime was quiet for a moment. "But I'm hoping you don't intend to get into this sort of trouble in the future."

"Oh, no," Anatoly said. "I'm not even sure how we ended up on this topic." _Well, I mean I know, but..._

Earth Prime chuckled. "Assuming you stay with us, you'll be able to discuss your options about your schooling in detail with Gollee Gren or someone equally qualified in the future."

"I see," Anatoly said. He wondered, briefly, if Earth Prime discussed things like this with people like him, all the time.

_I tend to take a special interest when special circumstances require it, and you could say I don't have young men popping into my Tower after doing a long-range teleport without a capsule very often. _He kindly didn't mention the bit where Anatoly had also been bleeding all over his floor. _Also, I like to talk to all telepaths and telekinetics of the T-4 range or higher, as those are the types of Talent that end up in my Towers._

_Is that my rating?_

_You're likely stronger than T-4. We'll know after the tests have been done._ "Unfortunately," he said, switching to vocal communication. "I'm afraid I don't have any more time to continue our conversation right now, but I hope to talk to you in the future, Anatoly. Gollee Gren is in one of the training areas, awaiting you, and there's an escort for you outside my door to show you the way there."

And at that obvious dismissal, Anatoly thanked Earth Prime and said his goodbyes, and found himself a short time later following a willowy dark-skinned woman towards the lower corner of Blundell where the training areas were.

_Oh, and Anatoly?_ Earth Prime said some time later. The thought felt half-distracted.

_Yes sir?_

_Ask Gollee Gren to introduce you to Ewain Lyon. Ewain is the younger brother of Clarf Prime, one of many brothers as they come from a large family, and should be able to get you some tanning cream that will match your skintone a bit better._

Oh. _Thank you, sir,_ Anatoly said, even as he felt himself turning red again.

_My pleasure._


	14. Chapter 13

**Chapter Thirteen**

Gollee Gren sat slouched in a chair in Earth Prime's office, a thoughtful finger on his chin.

"Bad day?" Jeff Raven asked him sympathetically.

"You could say that," Gollee replied. "I screwed up Anatoly's hair."

"You already mentioned that."

"Yeah, but tell me...why did I tell Anatoly to just forget about that scream? It's not that I don't _trust_ you, Jeff, but..." he trailed off. "Why is Hemlata here? And why was she screaming?"

Jeff's sympathetic expression faded, until he looked as grim as Gollee did, if not as slouched. He leaned forward over his desk, steepled his fingers thoughtfully, and his shields were spotless and impregnable, insofar as a T-4 as Gollee Gren was concerned. "Hemlata had a bit of an...incident."

"You're making it sound worse than it is with that wording--or so I _sincerely_ hope. Please, _please_ don't tell me anyone's dead...!"

Jeff's eyes widened. _You figured--you went the _entire day_ thinking that _that_ had happened, merely on my say-so?_ The wave of astonishment was strong for a second, before it was cut off as Jeff shielded again.

_Well, I wasn't one-hundred-percent _sure_, I had a lot of possibilities going through my mind, Jeff! But Anatoly, he just wanted to go haring off into things, barely-healed as he is with a leg that still bugs out on him, and _no_ knowledge of the situation. Like a little paladin. I had to keep an eye on him. He's _strong_ Jeff, I don't want him getting all colored by someone else's extreme circumstances. He's an orphan, she's an orphan. He might empathize, in the old-fashioned meaning of the word._

_That's a bad thing?_

_There's empathizing and empathizing, _Gollee pointed out, thinking briefly of Afra and Damia's once-wayward daughter Zara, who was now a medical Prime, since she was too empathic for the stress of Tower life.

Jeff grunted. _Hemlata didn't kill anyone._

_...but?_

_She tried to attack Flkm, and kicked Afra in the..._Jeff paused, and made a vague gesture at hip-height_._

Gollee sat up straighter in his chair, and crossed his feet before him. _You mean she just went up to him and--?!_

_Well, I don't know just how it happened, I didn't exactly press Afra for details! I actually picked it up from Damia._

Gollee tried to digest this, and finally sent a hopelessly tangled cloud of mixed anger that anyone would do that to Afra for any reason--Afra was practically his brother!--and hysterical amusement that _someone_ had just gone up to Afra and kicked him in the...Gollee burst into laughter. "I shouldn't be laughing at this," Gollee confided, his voice still thick with humor, while shaking his head. "In fact, I feel a little bit of self-respect floating away right now, but this is probably the _funniest_ thing I've heard since forever."

"Still wishing you had taken her home yourself?" Jeff asked wickedly.

"Well...fuck..." Gollee shook his head, neither agreeing or denying it. "How did Afra react?" he asked instead.

"He's asked for us to temporarily remove the dampers." Jeff paused. "Although the two aren't necessarily related."

Gollee abruptly straightened up in his chair. "Wait...what?!" Gollee said, grasping the arms of the chair as his amusement vanished. "He asked for _what_?!"

"That was my reaction, too. I told him he better have a damn good reason for asking that--and then he got all shirty with me."

"_Afra?_"

"I don't think I've ever seen him so upset. Probably didn't help that Damia wasn't on his side." Jeff rubbed his eyes suddenly with the heels of his hands. "He didn't get upset until I said no," he added thoughtfully. "I said it on reflex, and then _bang_, he just _stared_ at me, with those yellow eyes of his. Shields up, couldn't catch a thing, but he was _pissed_. Creepily reminiscent of Hemlata, actually."

"And then what happened? You said, 'Sure! Why not!'?"

Jeff sighed. "It's not that I can't say 'no' to Afra..." _But I can't honestly think of a time when something he's wanted to do has been ill-advised. He doesn't speak up often._

"You don't call this ill-advised?" _He's not infallible, you know._

"The dampers don't entirely work. She was able to project a loud enough emotional load that it got through them and gave Afra a headache, and she repeated it here, as you heard yourself. But it's sharply limited by distance, and, oddly, level of Talent. Pretty much everyone T-4 and above present in the Tower today queried me about it. But nobody outside of Blundell caught it, nor did anyone below T-5 or so. And normally..." he trailed off with a shrug.

Normally they both knew a shriek like that would be bringing queries from all over the planet, and from Primes on different planets as well.

"So what was her outburst about?"

"We told her we could put her into training to form a shield...but as a requirement, she would have to consent to having a telepath deep monitor her thoughts while she learned how to shield. She didn't like that." Jeff paused. "In retrospect, perhaps we should have let her calm down first before telling her."

"So she knows she's not burnt out?"

Jeff paused. "We told her her punishment caused her Talent to be highly diminished, but that she might have enough to learn how to shield."

"Poor kid. That's so technically true it makes my teeth hurt. The deep monitoring is because you're going to deactivate the dampers?"

"We're going to try to teach her how to shield with them in. As I said before, the dampers don't entirely work and shielding does pop up in individuals that don't otherwise have any other scrap of Talent in them. It's possible she can learn how to shield without removing them. If that fails, I will go with Afra's original suggestion to remove them entirely for the duration of training."

"Who will be monitoring?"

"Hemlata's choice. We haven't told her who her choices would be yet, but she knows she will have a choice. Afra has offered himself..."

"Glutton for punishment."

"Well, he's Afra. And he's very attached to her. I'm not sure why, and it's almost disturbing..."

"Has anyone else offered?"

"You won't be offering," Earth Prime said.

Gollee made a face. "Just like that?"

"Your duties aren't as flexible as Afra's can be made to be. And I need you here for Anatoly, which won't be possible if you're deeply linked into Hemlata's mind."

"True enough."

"And you're fascinated by the medical implications of things, and I don't want Hemlata to pick that up."

Gollee looked embarrassed. "No medics have offered yet?"

"_You're_ not a medic. Zara offered, she was here when Afra, Damia, and Hemlata came; I said no. She's already involved in working on the Mrdini reproductive program, and I can't help but think linking her to Hemlata would cause more harm than good. Elizara wanted to, but she doesn't have the telekinetic oomph we think might be needed with Hemlata. Ewain offered too."

"And he's not a choice, because...?"

"Oh, _he's_ a still a choice. We just haven't decided if he will be more harmful or helpful. We're going to talk to Petra, too. Maybe both of them. If they can forge a rapport of some sort with Hemlata, she might start to accept the Lyons as a real family; Petra and Ewain on both sides of her to brace her, with Afra and Damia as parental figures."

"I'm not sure shoe-horning her in like that will work."

"Nor am I; we're still considering our options. The main issue being, I'd rather not have Hemlata in contact with high-level Talents that may be empathic with her in all the wrong ways. And if Afra figured out we have the technology to mostly suppress Prime-level Talent, I'm sure someone else, given access to the right information, as they would be by linking in to monitor the girl's mind, could figure it out too." Jeff sighed. "I'll keep you informed as things develop; the girl is still trying to decide if she wants to accept such a bittersweet offer. She would be delighted to have us out of her mind, once and for all, but the thought of having us link and monitor her during training frightens her. Deeply. She can't decide if the offer is her punishment for attacking the Mrdini, or if she somehow got what she wanted by throwing a fit. We're hoping she'll decide the former."

"Well, if there's anything I can do, let me know."

"Nothing now in regards to Hemlata. I want you to work with Anatoly, get him settled in; let me know if there's anything he needs that we're not already providing. He seems a very amiable self-sufficient young man, but we don't need to forget about him because of that. I'm impressed that he doesn't hate you."

"He doesn't?" Gollee Gren asked in surprise.

"His thoughts were grumbly, but there was an underlying sense of amusement, as if something as silly as hair could never get him really, truly upset. He grumbled to himself more because he felt he should be grumbling, more than anything."

"Man, I'm going to have to make that up to him," Gollee said. "Even if he isn't upset. I know I would have skewered anyone who had a hand in messing up my hair that badly when I was his age."

"I wasn't the most self-conscious of teenagers, but going from having a full head of hair to being mostly bald would have gotten to me, too," Jeff agreed.

"I wonder what I can do," Gollee mused to himself, propping his head in his hand.

"Keep your ears pricked; if you don't think of something, I'm sure he will, and speaking of teaching people to shield, he could use a little help. Living by himself on a world with no other minds available has left him very wide open."

"Yeah, I noticed that. I'll see what I can do; he'd probably appreciate having rudimentary shields before we put him in classes."

"Undoubtedly."

The two men fell silent after that, only the faint, shielded buzz of preoccupied thoughts filling the space between them. Finally, Gollee sighed and rose to his feet, undoing the pips at his collar, and the com curled around his ear. "I need to get home. My wife is expecting me home early tonight, we're going to go watch a show--"

"What show?" Jeff asked politely.

"Damned if I know, it's something she's been pestering me to see," Gollee said, and the two of them pushed aside serious matters with a little idle chit chat before winding up their day at Earth Tower.

* * *

**Author's Notes:** Short chappie today, sorry. Although on another note, I've started (hah!) another fic...it's a Pern fic called _The Skyboom_. You can get to it from my profile. Let me know what you think!


	15. Chapter 14

**Chapter Fourteen**

"The ethics here are convoluted," Elizara told the group of high-level Talents that had volunteered to assist in Hemlata's training and monitoring. "Hemlata is a Prime-level untrained Talent. She's murdered--albeit accidentally--and she's attacked a non-human sentient, which was _not_--as far as we can tell--accidental. Since she is a minor, by law, we are required to offer her several options of rehabilitation--"

"--for the record, I'd like to see her rehabilitated for more than just because the law says I must," Jeff Raven, in his role as Earth Prime, interjected. "She's had a rough life."

"Of course, so do I, I'm just going over the rules here," Elizara said.

"Understood," Jeff said, leaning his rump against the edge of a table, and crossing his arms over his chest.

Elizara continued. "We must offer her several options of rehabilitation, while also constraining her Talent so that it does not pose a threat to any individual, or to the FT&T at large. Afra and Damia Lyon have very kindly been acting as foster parents for Hemlata over the last few months. However, as I understand it, matters have come to a head--do you wish to explain, Afra?"

Afra nodded shortly, and spoke. "Damia and I took Hemlata in a few months back, once we became aware of her situation. She was sold and bought as a toddler, illegally and for reasons unknown to us, by her birth mother to a small commune of male minors living in Capella's arid spans. She was severely abused, mostly mentally in an un-Talented sense, but there is some evidence of physical neglect and harm as well. She escaped from this situation--peacefully--with the use of her Talent. Capella Tower discovered her, and took her in, fed and clothed her, and was going to put her into schooling, when her environment unexpectedly triggered some sort of flashback, and she killed a man with her mind due to her fear. Which has made a difficult situation more difficult for her."

Petra and Ewain, who were sitting among the other Talents tapped by Elizara for this project, looked surprised, then grim.

Jeff stepped in and took the narrative from Afra. "After this happened, _I_ was alerted in my capacity as Earth Prime, and she was sent here. Unfortunately I am not given very much leeway by the law; murder by a Talent, especially if done via Talent, mandates burnout. However, as Elizara mentioned earlier, Hemlata is a Prime, and there's no known way to burn out a Prime that doesn't carry a very high risk of death. Because we do not have a death penalty, and because she is a minor, we consulted and were able to satisfy the requirements of the law by merely disabling her Talent. Please keep in mind that this is a classified FT&T subject. Officially, she was burned out, which is what she herself believes. But I wasn't willing to kill a child while attempting to burn out her T-1 level mind, so we implanted prototype dampers in her forehead, so that she may continue to live, and so that her Talent would be restricted. Again, this knowledge must _not_ leave this room, or your heads." And he tapped on his temple to illustrate his point.

"After that was done," Afra said, picking up the narrative again after Jeff had let his words sink in, "That's when Damia and I took her home." He was quiet for a moment. "She's...difficult to work with. For most of her life she has lived in an environment that ranged from negligent of her well-being to being openly hostile, and as a result she's paranoid in her thinking, and doesn't trust people. She's also terribly lonely, and frightened, but she also has had a lot of practice of...conforming outwardly to Capella's Method, so it's very difficult to get a straight answer out of her about how she feels about anything, and she's unwilling to form social bonds, because she feels that they are improper, which is a _gross_ distortion of the Method...but _not_ a surprising one.

"_All_ of this makes teaching her by example very slow going." Afra paused to absently fiddle with the com pad he was holding; those who knew him were aware that despite his impenetrateable shields, he was distressed. "Every move we make is suspect, every word we utter she considers a lie. However, that wasn't _unexpected_ by us when we took her in, and we've been attempting to deal with it.

"The actual _unexpected_ issue here is that Hemlata has no shields, and she is profoundly paranoid about her thoughts being read." Afra paused again. "And, because she is a high Talent, dampered or not, _yes_, we've been keeping a line on her thoughts, as we would with any other developing Talent. As we did with our children. This obviously confirms to her that her paranoia is _correct_.

"Typically, we monitor young, strong talents in an effort to _prevent _malign modes of thought from developing; in Hemlata's case, she's largely self-taught, and being neglected for most of her life has caused her to develop selfish, cunning, and agressive modes of thought--traits that I, and I assume any of you with children, worked to soften or eliminate as they grew up. For those of you who are childless--three year olds can be beastly...and it's a parent's place to teach them manners, and to think of others in addition to thinking of themselves. Hemlata, however, interprets our parental eye on her as an attack against her core self. And, given that her core personality, warts and all, is what gave her the _strength _in the first place to leave the horrible situation she grew up in, she is very hostile to anything she thinks violates the sanctity of her mind. She's worked hard to differentiate herself from the people raising her. Therefore, being in the mere presence of a telepath concerns her deeply--yet, we can _not_ shift her to a non-Talented family--"

"--because the dampers can be pulled out, and underneath them she's still a Prime," Jeff said. "And it's very likely that if she did remove them herself, it would be in a situation of extreme stress, would make the likelihood of her then _misusing_ her talent after removing them exponentially higher, particularly if she was living with an entirely un-Talented family which might not understand what was happening until too late, and even then, wouldn't have the abilities to do anything about it."

Afra nodded. "Hemlata does not trust in material things, but she trusts in her own mind. We could give her a skullcap, in fact she found one herself," Afra said. "But she wouldn't entirely trust it, because it could be removed physically. I think the best solution to get rid of her intense paranoia of her thoughts being read so that we can focus on raising and loving her in a Talented environment is by teaching her how to shield. She's a T-1; if she learns how to shield, it will keep everyone out. Non-Talents raise children without telepathy; I don't see why we can't do that here. But, to give her a shield, there's a good chance we will need to remove the dampers--"

"--which means," Jeff said, "Twenty-four-seven surveillance by a high-powered Telepath."

"Which comes back to ethics," Elizara said, stepping in, "given that the deep link being made to monitor her thoughts would violate them. Essentially, I think Afra has correctly deduced what she needs--but we're caught between the law and our own safety, and her best interests, and therefore we have this ethical issue before us."

"What are the alternative plans?" Seraphineas DuVocchi asked. S/he was a Talent of ambiguous gender, but had a beautiful alto voice, and a quick and agile mind. "If we all decide here and now that she's an angry little pissant that will never grow up to be anything good, and that we shouldn't waste our time or our sanity monitoring her deepest thoughts?"

"We don't have any, yet," Afra Lyon told her.

"You won't take her home?" Seraphineas challenged.

Afra's eyes flashed in an unusual display of temper, although his tone was still mild. "I would prefer to. But if the environment is causing her so much pain, wouldn't it be selfish to keep her with us just so we can pat ourselves on the back and say that we are good people? She may do better in a non-Talented family. However, we're not quite to that point, yet. You don't erase years of mistreatment in a few months."

Seraphineas smiled. "So you really _don't_ have any other ideas. Well, I'm still in," and she glanced around the room.

There were murmurs of assent. "I'd hate to have another Clarissia ," someone said. Petra leaned over to say something to her brother Ewain.

"I will put together a printout and biographies for her," Elizara said. "Thank you all for volunteering."

#

Hemlata sat in a corner of the hospital room with a box of tissue, replaying the events through her head...both the one where she'd kicked Afra, and the one in Blundell when she hadn't been able to contain her rage. She was scared, irrationally scared, that they were going to come for her, that they were going to hurt her.

They hadn't, yet. A rational part of her said they probably wouldn't hurt her, not physically. But they wanted to force her to allow another mind to link into hers. They wanted to force her to give permission to read to her mind.

It was terrifying.

She _did _feel guilty. That she had hurt Afra. She hadn't meant to hurt him, but he had grabbed her around the chest, and...she'd just reacted. Despite that, he'd been the only spot of warmth in the house when she'd finally come upstairs out of the pool room; Damia's eyes had held an icy-cold fury, and the Mrdini avoided looking at Hemlata when she had emerged. Not that she particularly cared what _they_ thought. But Afra had also walked with a hitch in his long-legged stride, and she spent the entire trip to the Tower, and out to Blundell, avoiding his eyes, avoiding his touch. She'd done things she shouldn't have done, and she knew any decent Capellan should, by all rights, shun her for it.

Instead, that man with the piercing blue eyes, Earth Prime, made her an offer.

Hemlata had a choice to make. They would teach her how to make a natural shield, so she wouldn't have to wear a skullcap if she wanted to keep Talents out of her mind. But this required that she _let them_ into her mind for an unspecified amount of time in the first place.

They wanted into her head. Why would they do this? Why couldn't she be left alone? She didn't really deserve a family anyway, not after what she'd done to them. Why couldn't they put her in jail or something?

_Why_ did they want to keep her out of it--and control her thoughts?

That made her angry all over again...but there was another part of her that just wanted to give in, to stop fighting, to stop the pain. She wondered if they could do that, for her. And the thought that maybe they could make it all stop hurting made her cry again. The tissues were starting to be harsh against her nose, and the box dug into her belly and chest, but she clutched it to her like a stuffed toy, like a shield. And a little ironic thought in the back of her mind, from the part of her that was always watchful, made note that she was using a box of _tissue_ as a shield. As if that would do her any good. The thought made her want to cry again.

A medic came in sometime later, and sat on the immaculately-made hospital bed. "You don't have to sit in the corner, you know," she told Hemlata. She wore a tag on her outfit that said her name was Elizara. Hemlata didn't know if that was a first name or a last name, but she was a T-1 something, according to the pins on her collar.

Hemlata said nothing. She couldn't bear to sit on someone else's furniture right now, given how she'd treated her host family. She deserved to be locked up in a cellar like some sort of beast.

The woman watched her for a long moment, a sad little frown on her face. Then she looked at the thin com pad in her hands, slipped out a little blue stylus, and tapped some things. The com pad made faint artificial clicking noises as she poked buttons with the stylus. "In regards to the offer to teach you how to shield that was put forth by Earth Prime--I have a list of some people who would be willing to teach you, and monitor you for the duration of the teaching."

In other words, the woman had a list of people willing to mind-rape her. Hemlata hid her face in the box of tissues, pretending it was something soft and warm that loved her.

"Afra has already offered, as you know," the woman said.

Capellan men were perverse, Hemlata thought. How well she knew that.

"In addition to that, there's also Ewain and Petra Lyon; they're closer to your age. Petra is two years older than you, and Ewain is four years older. They are Damia and Afra Lyon's youngest two children."

Hemlata didn't say anything. She didn't want so-called _peers_ mind-raping her either.

"We also have Mercy Gren, who is Gollee's eldest granddaughter..."

_Wonderful name,_ Hemlata thought with dark humor.

"...and Seraphineas DuVocchi, who has a distant relationship to the Raven clan." Elizara hesitated. "She is a mutant, however. Just so you are aware."

_Mutant?_ Hemlata had heard of them, but only in whispers. She wondered what was actually mutated about mutants--she'd never been told.

"They can self-impregnate, if they wish to have children without a partner, no matter what their visible gender is," Elizara said.

_That's disgusting._

Elizara didn't comment on that thought if she heard it. "Paul Rarnell has offered, he's a first-generation Talent, so he has no ties to any of the Talents you've met so far. Chester Lyon has offered as well," she went on. "He's from a different branch of the family, though, than Afra--he's Capellan, and lives on Capella. I have biographies on everyone on this sheet; I'm going to leave it here, next to the bed, for you to look over if you 'd like. Is there anything I can get you, before I go?"

Hemlata shook her head.

Elizara looked worried that Hemlata did not ask her for anything, but didn't say anything about it directly. "Well then. Let us know if you need anything. Otherwise, I will see you tomorrow morning."

Hemlata watched her leave without a word.

#

Hemlata didn't touch the printout until the wall clock said it was well after midnight, Blundell time. Putting her tissue box aside, she stood, her whole body feeling achy and tired, and retrieved the printout to see what it said.

She read it for a few moments, poking it with a plastic stylus to move from page to page, before realizing with shock that the biographies were very high-level, and contained things she didn't think she was supposed to see. She felt a blush rise in her cheeks, and put it aside for a moment, before a perverse curiosity caused her to look again.

Afra's biography was the longest, as he was the oldest of the group that had offered; his daughter Petra's was the shortest, as she was youngest, but only by a few lines since Ewain's was short too. Seraphineas had the second-longest biography; s/he was a first generation mutant, and a lot of the biography covered her decisions to go forward with that sort of physical change, and Hemlata's curiosity was not prurient enough to read through the entirety of it. Everybody's bio, on first glance, seemed disgustingly normal. Except perhaps Seraphineas'.

Frowning, she sat on the edge of the bed, ready to retreat to her corner if anyone entered the room, and began to read through the biographies.

#

"Have you chosen?" she was asked the next morning, when they brought her to the small cafeteria for breakfast.

Hemlata looked up from her eggs at the medic, Elizara. "Mr. Lyon," she said, politely putting her fork down.

"You can eat. Which Lyon?"

"Oh. Afra Lyon."

"And who else?"

"I need to choose another one?" Hemlata asked, confused.

"Afra may get sick, or hurt, or something may happen that he's needed for."

"Ms. DuVocchi. Mr. DuVocchi?" The holo was a bit ambiguous.

"I think they accept either."

"Okay," Hemlata said, and wondered if her choices were mistakes.

#

Hemlata awoke, her sinuses feeling acrid and runny, as if she was just getting over a nasty head cold.

_It's an aftereffect of the drugs used to ease the way for our link,_ a quiet, male voice said in her head. It felt as if it were coming up from beneath her, through the floor and the mattress, and it sounded eerily like Afra's speaking voice.

Afra chuckled. _Everyone keeps telling me that, but I'm not quite sure why it's so eerie that I sound like myself,_ Afra replied, lavender-and-herby amusement tickling her brainstem.

Hemlata rubbed the back of her neck against her shoulders, and tried not to be afraid of the vivid pseudo-sensations that came across with his words. She could almost smell the lavender and herbs, but how could that be? It was a false sensation...perhaps something _pushed_ at her, or _leaned_ on her...

_There is no single region for telepathy in the mind; because of this, there is a high level of sensory crossover in telepathic contacts. Everyone experiences it, but it differs slightly from person to person. To me, you taste of clay, mica, and dark chocolate. But you are not showing me those things; my mind is just taking concepts that resonate with what I feel is in your mental touch._

Hemlata thought about this. _Dark...because of my skin?_

Surprise. It felt like her own surprise, yet not; it was still surprise, but there were no tinges of fear, or wariness. It was a surprise that held confidence that it could deal with whatever what was surprising. She wished she had that sort of surprise in her.

_No_, Afra said. _Dark as in unsweetened. Bitter chocolate; chocolate with a bite._

Hemlata thought that sounded complex.

_People are complex,_ Afra said. _What does my mental touch feel like to you?_

_Citrus,_ Hemlata said._ Sometimes lemon. Sometimes oranges. And brown cinnamon. Right now you're orange. The day you brought me to Aurigae you were lemon, I think._

Surprise, again. But with the conspicuous--to her--lack of fear. Again, it underlined that the surprise she felt was not her _own_ surprise. Her surprise always held a note of fear. It was strange to be able to feel it without that fear. _Really? You felt lemon that day?_ Afra asked.

_And a little bit of pine,_ she confessed.

_Sounds like a bathroom cleaner._

Hemlata imagined Afra's image on the side of a cleaning agent bottle, and laughed in her head, although she restrained it in her body. In return, she felt his amusement quiver down their link. Lavender again. And then--the strong, clinging scent of pine. Stronger than the orange in his mental touch. But different; this scene almost made her nose tingle.

_Like that?_ he said.

_You can send scents?_

_And pictures, and noises, and more,_ Afra said. _Depending on your individual abilities._ And suddenly, the scent of pine was gone without a trace, and in its place, a busy scene of travelers scuttling around and queuing up for their tickets in Earth Tower. The perspective seemed skewed, as if she were walking on stilts.

_Mmm,_ Afra said. _I suppose you could think that._ Amusement._ I'm people watching; you are seeing what I see._

Hemlata wondered if he wanted her to come down to where he was, but she felt his answering unvoiced "no" almost before her own thought completed.

_Make yourself comfortable, I would like you to stay here with me for a while, while I do some crowd control._

_...crowd control?_

_Indeed. We have a grumpy crowd today due to some 'ports that were cancelled. A couple of luxury liners' environmental systems failed to pass the required tests. The FT&T has never had a 'port go astray, but liners scheduled for direct 'ports can sometimes end up as dropoff or layover 'ports, if the destination Tower is having a heavy day and can't catch it live, or if an emergency has occurred planetside that the Prime needs to attend to. For example, most 'ports from Earth to Deneb are dropoffs; the sending Prime leaves cargo at a halfway spot, usually near a star system, and Prime Raven--Jeran Raven in this case--comes to pick it up as his scheduling allows. So the liners really need to have their environmental systems in order._

_Couldn't the sending Prime 'port it the whole way?_ Hemlata wanted to know, curious.

_Usually, yes, but it takes more effort and there's a lot more cargo still to come, so why should they if the destination has a Prime on its end to take up some of the burden?_

Hemlata thought that made a certain sense.

_Anyway, cancellations mean grumpy people. Grumpy people mean grumpy Talents, which means inefficient--and hostile--working conditions, even though the Tower is heavily shielded between the waiting areas where travelers are, and working areas where Talents do their jobs. So we perform some mild crowd control to put them in a better mood._

Hemlata wasn't sure what she thought about that; it seemed a ploy to try to inure her to the idea that...that messing with people telepathically, or empathically, was okay. And she didn't really think it was.

_Ethics is an issue that has been necessary to explore by Talents since before the FT&T was founded. I'm not surprised that you feel the way you do; it is very easy to conjure up a nightmare scenario where a telepath comes and invades your mind and controls your every move when you know that you have no defenses against such a thing, and the only thing that is keeping the telepath at bay is their own individual morals, and not any hard, _real_ limit._

Hemlata did not answer. Was he plucking ideas from her mind, or following the logic mundanely?

_The FT&T is, essentially, built on trust. The governments trust that we're not going to stage some sort of coup. Some Talents that grew up in Talented families think the idea is ludicrous, but the fact is, it would be very easy for the FT&T to take control of the entire Human side of the Alliance, if the top levels of Talent were corrupt. And if the people in the government are doing their jobs competently--and some government workers are competent, all jokes aside--they must take that possibility into consideration. Putting their fingers in their ears and going "lalalala" won't change the _fact_ that the FT&T could stage a coup with little resistance if it played its cards right. The military's bullets and bombs just don't matter to a powerful telekinetic that can just lob them into the sun--like Jeff Raven did when Hivers attacked his homeworld. So it is absolutely _vital_ that the FT&T always shows itself in both promises and actions to be ethical, to be in control of its Talents. The alternative is the FT&T being pushed into a position where non-Talents become hostile, and Talents, fearing for themselves, use their Talent unethically as protection, which would cause a chain reaction of fear and mistrust that would end up in a Talent witch-hunt on one hand, or Talent-controlled government on the other hand. The _only_ reason the FT&T is in the position it is in today is because those early Talents three hundred years ago that founded the precursor to the FT&T had the foresight--either the mundane foresight of wisdom, or clairvoyant foresight--to start planting the seeds of trust when Talent was still small, before Primes began appearing in the population._

_So, as a result, there are ethical rules, with heavy penalties if they are broken. Talents committing treasonous acts against the Alliance are dealt with harshly by the FT&T. As are Talents that have committed murder, and Talents that have misused their Talent grossly, such as by destroying a mind, or threatening to carry out some criminal act against another person that only a Talent can do. These rules are necessary to maintain the level of trust._ And then Afra's mental voice softened. _And this is what happened to you._

_I didn't mean to break the rules,_ Hemlata thought, feeling distressed again. She hadn't intended to kill anyone.

_I know._ The words were gentle._ And it was very painful for Jeff Raven to have to punish you for it._

Hemlata wasn't certain of that; Earth Prime had a strong charisma and power that scared her deeply. She had sensed no remorse, just duty.

Afra paused, and Hemlata caught a wisp of surprise again. She wondered why.

_I...ah..._

_What did you see in my mind? _she demanded, when it seemedthat Afra wasn't going to explain his surprise.

Another pause. _I hadn't realized you picked up on his charisma. It _was_ painful for him to have to punish you like I said, and as a result, you saw very much the fierce Earth Prime that keeps his Talents in line, and very little of the friendly charismatic person he usually is._

Well. Earth Prime was Damia's father and Afra's father-in-law, so Hemlata was certain they probably saw another side to him.

_But because the audience is limited doesn't mean the side does not exist. The only one who has known Jeff longer is his wife, the Rowan, but aside from that I was probably the third or fourth person off of Deneb he met, and I was only not the second person because I didn't usually work Callisto's cargo floor, which is where he 'ported himself in. I did assist in training him, however. "Father-in-law" is really something of a family joke; when Damia and I became partners, it was really something of a surprise for everyone. He'd made jokes about me marrying into his family, but certainly didn't expect me to marry his daughter._ And Afra chuckled in her mind. _My point here is that I'm not schmoozing about him because he's my father-in-law and my boss and I have to keep the peace. I knew him before he was Earth Prime. I knew him before he was even formally rated as Prime. The responsibility for your loss of Talent weighs heavily on him, and I truly wish you could have met him for the first time under better circumstances._

Hemlata wasn't really sure what to make of that, so she didn't say anything.

_Anyway, regarding ethics..._and Afra turned them back on topic. W_hile the rules are very stringent for large-scale breeches in ethics, of the type that have been prohibited by law for centuries such as theft and murder, personal ethics for smaller things can vary greatly. For example, this crowd control--it benefits nobody if a crowd is grumpy. The people being grumpy don't like being grumpy. Any empaths in the area don't like picking up on the grumpiness, and the ticket handlers and people working in the food courts don't like serving a grumpy crowd because the anger inevitably spills over on them improperly when they're just trying to do their job. Crowd control is a very general sort of "lean"; I'm not targeting any specific person, and I am not adjusting their thoughts, I'm just altering the mood of the crowd-organism. There is the argument that people whose moods have been changed will think differently, which is true enough, but we are not controlling what they think while they are in a happier mood; they still have the benefit of personal choice. It's very easy to nit-pick ethics and split hairs so finely that any Talented endeavor is no longer practical. There are actually a few people in Earth Tower who have based their careers on the consideration of Talent ethics, and they help create the bigger, broader rules that Talented society lives by, but individually it comes down to being practical, and also your intent. My intent is not malign; I am not lulling the crowd in preparation for some sort of attack, or just for the fun of it. Intent does matter in small-scale ethical breeches; if I somehow had charges brought against me because someone here is upset at the crowd control, a telepath acting officially would read my mind to see my intent at the time of the incident, and they would determine that a temporary, non-permanent lean done during the course of crowd control duty for no ulterior motives is not considered to be a breech of ethics. On the other hand, if I was lulling a crowd so my friend-the-pickpocket could relieve travelers of their credits, then there would be a problem. Either way, the crowd is being lulled. The difference is in the intent._

_So if a telepath was to read your mind right now,_ Hemlata said. _What would they find?_

_They would find that this is indeed a grumpy crowd, and that I specifically asked for a crowd-control position this morning so that I could demonstrate the process to you, and talk to you about ethics._

..._oh._

She felt Afra's brief smile. _Touching on crowd-control ethics one more time, I am wearing an official crowd-control uniform. So anyone walking past me knows I'm on duty altering the emotional atmosphere. We aren't keeping them in the dark about it!_

_And, using that as a segue, in a family of high talents, a lot of Talented "tricks" go on that aren't acceptable in public among non-Talents. My family, for example, uses a lot of telepathy in front of non-Talents. In the Gwyn-Raven family--Jeff and the Rowan's--this would be unacceptable. As it would be in the family that I grew up with on Capella. However, since my family lives with Mrdini, and sometimes there are things that need to be discussed among Humans, it's better to carry on the conversation telepathically than to physically remove ourselves from them, which could cause insult unintentionally. That is one example of how Damia and myself chose to deviate from the norm in raising our family, due to the fact that our household became home not only for ourselves, but the Mrdini, and our strongly Talented offspring._

_There is another aspect of our household that does not follow the norm for Talented families. All eight of our children are Prime-level Talents. I believe it's actually in a record book somewhere,_ and Afra let a rueful chuckle seep into his mental tone. _Primes, if identified early, as ours were, are monitored from birth--their thoughts, their deeds, everything. By electronic devices if their home does not have a Talent powerful enough to pick up their subtle moods._

Hemlata pulled away from the contact a little, withdrawing. It wasn't as if she hadn't suspected, hadn't known, but it was different to hear it verified. It must be terrible to live in a fishbowl, with every action, every thought observed and judged. It had been difficult enough for her, when some of her actions, such as taking a shower or eating a piece of bread had been twisted to use against her as a weapon. She'd been accused of using up the day's water ration so that one of the men who had been headed on a date wouldn't be able to clean up, and she had done _that_, obviously, because she was _jealous_. She had taken a piece of bread without giving anyone profuse thanks for being able to eat. She didn't know how to stop eating--she didn't think she was a pig, and she was so _hungry_. She hadn't realized that on that day she couldn't shower, or couldn't eat. They just told her out of the blue, and punished her.

She hated being observed like a hawk like that.

_That was wrong,_ Afra said, with quiet conviction.

The men had been convinced that _they_ were right, though. Everyone was convinced about themselves. Everyone. Nobody seemed uncertain.

_People are very often uncertain, but they mask it with a veneer of confidence. I find that the people who are most uncertain, and the most meticulous about hiding it, often make the most grievous trespasses against others, for fear of being hurt themselves. They refuse to stand down, when a person truly confident in themselves would feel no shame in admitting that they were wrong. Or, at the least, would feel shame in hurting another person merely because they were afraid of being hurt themselves._

Hemlata pulled away from his mind, best she could. She'd done nothing wrong!

There was a long pause from Afra. _I was speaking of the adults you lived with before, actually._

_You don't know them. You never met them._

_I haven't?_ Afra asked.

Hemlata felt shock and fear. Had he gone to meet them? They'd probably lied about her. They always said all sorts of things. It never made any _sense_.

_Yes_, he said. _They seem adept at telling tall tales._

She wanted to know more than that, but was afraid to ask. She felt like crying again.

_Come back and observe with me on crowd control, Hemlata. If you see me doing something unethical, I'd like you to report it to the appropriate person._

_What_? She asked, confused. She couldn't decide if she was confused because he'd never do anything unethical, or confused because it smelled like a trap--that maybe he would do something unethical, but he was already tight with the powers-that-be, so they wouldn't punish him anyway.

_No tricks, no traps. You, and everyone else, has the right to report a suspected Talent ethical infringement. It doesn't automatically mean the person you accuse will be punished, otherwise people would lie and try to get others into trouble for personal reasons, but it does give you power should you truly see something improper happen. Come,_ and Hemlata felt a gentle tugging at her mind. _Watch through my eyes._ And he opened up what seemed to be the first layer of his mind to her.

Cautiously, she accepted the contact, and looked through his eyes again, out at the crowd. _I thought I was going to be taught to shield_.

_Yes. But not first. If you learn to shield first, without learning anything else at all, it might cripple you._

She felt fear, again, at that. She didn't want to be crippled. So she nervously watched through his eyes, and because he'd brought it up, wondered if she'd even know if he decided to do something "unethical". She didn't understand what he was doing with her here, at all. It still felt like a trap; people didn't usually focus on her like this unless they were trying to trap her.

_Watch and learn_, he said.

* * *

**Author's Notes: **Wow. Never meant to take this long to update! (I also said I'd do it like three weeks ago in the notes of my Pern fanfic--sorry!) Hemlata is...interesting to work with. Not only do I need to form her opinions on everything, but I have to psych Afra out too. And, um, avoid my own tenancies for making relationships really weird. (I figure my original fic will take care of that so I might as well do the fanfic in a straightforward manner.) The Talent books actually aren't all that psychological, even if they're about psychics, so there's no *direct* canon to run from with Afra...just speculation based on what we did see of his character. I'm speculating pretty damn hard!

I am also working on an update for _Sackcloth and Ashes_. No promises on the date, although I *hope* it's soon.

I also have another Talent fic I had to run by some readers beforehand before putting up here, since the subject matter is a little...adult. I wasn't sure if it'd violate Anne McCaffrey's rules on fanfic or not...the consensus seems that it treads the line, but doesn't quite overstep it. That said, it has hands-down the best interaction between Gollee Gren and Jeff Raven that I've ever written. Probably the best scenes that I've ever written for fanfic, actually. I'll try to get _that_ one up today, although fair warning--I have _no_ clue where it's going so it will get updated very irregularly, since I _do_ know where _Boxed_, _Sackcloth and Ashes_, and my Pern fic _The Skyboom_ are going.


	16. Intermission

**Intermission**

They broked this site :(

Since there's no status update on the front page of fanfiction dot net, and because I'm getting **intensely** frustrated, I figured I'd update my stories to let you guys know that this site has been broken since March 21st, 2011.

**Things that are broken with ff dot net:**

- Notification emails. It's definitely broken for gmail. It may be broken for other email providers. The notification emails take DAYS to arrive when A) a story is updated, B) a story is reviewed, C) a story is favorited/put on alert/etc, D) a PM is received. Literally. Days. Yet my gmail thinks the day it arrives is the day it was sent, which points to a severe email queue backup problem here. Their email servers are choking for some reason.

I'm tearing my hair out over this. Hatehatehate email notifications being down, as the only other way to notice is to memorize the numbers on the statistics page and notice when they change.

- Large fandoms are reporting the only way to update or post a new a fanfic is to do a hack-ish work around. This doesn't affect Dragonriders of Pern so far, but it affects larger fandoms as far as I've heard, so if you're wondering why certain categories haven't been updated, this is why.

I've sent an email to the site support, but they're a 1 or 2 man show, and given this site isn't exactly a money-maker they don't show much interest in righting things quickly or even giving an update on the front page. I don't doubt my email is one out of hundreds that was sent to them. I see no reason for them to answer mine soon or at all if they haven't responded to the others.

**Enter AO3**

So. I'm peddling a better universal fanfic site. I am in the process of getting my entire archive up on Archive of Our Own (also known as AO3). If you go to my profile on this site, you can click on the link to go directly there. (Chapters like this one strip out links and URLs else I'd put a link right here for you.)

**Why I prefer AO3: **

- _No ads_

- _Nicer layout_

- _Very robust tags._ Just finish a surprisingly good Jaxom/Lessa fic? (hehe) If the author used the Jaxom/Lessa tag, you can just click on it and find more.

- _The ratings/warnings system is more nuanced._ You have the normal G to Mature thing, but you can also give warnings for slash, kinks, and other things folks may want to be warned about. For example, my story Weyrbred Lads has a blue icon in the upper right, indicating a male/male relationship.

- _The crossover system just works better._ I can put The Day Benden Went to War in both Dragonriders of Pern and Talent categories without being afraid I'm missing all the Pern People that don't browse crossovers.

- _The co-author thing (although I don't use it as an author, only as a reader) works better._ You get direct links to each other's pages.

- If an author wrote a story as a part of a challenge, or for a specific recipient, you can go to that person's profile right from the story. (The one that received the fic.)

- _You can "like" a story without needing to comment._ If you want folks to know you liked a story, but you don't have a specific comment, you can leave kudos.

- _Comments are threaded._ You can respond to someone else's comment. As a reader OR as an author. I respond to comments on AO3!

AO3 is currently in Beta. Some of the functionality that THIS site already has is in the future roadmap to be implemented on AO3. To join you can sign up and wait for the queue to pop (it can take few weeks wait until you get your invite), or you can get an instant invite from someone you know. I don't currently have invites, but I'm trying to get my hands on some. **But you can read and review without having an account.**

**Twitter:**

I've joined Twitter as dmdomini . Link in my profile. I'll tweet fanfic updates as I make them.


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